The Hampstead Authors' Society
Crossing centuries, cultures and styles
Zsuzsanna Ardó in conversation with Warren Wills about his concert, A History of Jewish Music.
Zsuzsanna Ardó: What triggered the idea of A History of Jewish Music?
Warren Wills: For many years I have explored ‘niche’ passions, Persian music, Spanish music, and so on. Clearly the time was ripe to return fully to my roots and my heritage with a Jewish concert.
ZA: How did then the idea turn into the creative process itself?
WW: After some thought, it was clear that the concert needed to based on my own personal Jewishness, and the experiences gained from my childhood. The Seder, Yom Kippur, through seeing Fiddler on the Roof, my mother singing Eli Eli. Thus the ideas was formed, a historic sojourn, but at a micro level.
ZA: How long did it take from the idea to the final product – the premier?
WW: I then brought in opera singers to sing Koi Nidrei, a Klezmer violinist, a singer of modern/jazz for the Lorenz Hart/Bernstein/Lionel Bart musical section, and over a couple of months all was in place.
ZA: Why at the New End Theatre?
WW: This was to be the first step on the road to bring virtuosity, passion, humour to the recital platform, and the New End would be a perfect launch pad. As it transpired, it could not have worked out any better.
ZA: It seemed like an intimate, one-off dress rehearsal at the New End Theatre – as if you were testing the material and the genre for a bigger production on a bigger stage, at a later stage.
WW: I would like to go forward and bring in a choir and further singers in a bigger arena. Yes, indeed it was testing the water to see if the material, the repertoire, the box office, and the audience would find an interaction, a positive response. This certainly was the case, and it inspires me to move further forward with this passion.
ZA: Could you tell us about the nitty-gritty details of your creative process?
WW: I needed to focus on two things: firstly, how to compile a diverse, interesting, entertaining, fun, poignant and virtuosic evening. What to include and what to leave out. Secondly, I needed to decide how to shape and structure this once I had selected the material.
Thus it seemed the most logical to present the evening chronologically from early Jewish/Roman/Greco times, through to religious and orthodox, through more recent prayer, through to Yiddish and Klezmer. This comprised Act 1.
In Act 2, I looked at original composition in the form of setting Primo Levi poems to music, and then Bernstein, Weill, Gershwin, Bart and finally Fiddler on the Roof excerpts in a more 20th Century exploration.
ZA: How do you structure your days?
WW: At the moment 10 hours are spent on MD’ing and performing two shows in Wimbledon. Then five hours on preparing three new shows for Hong Kong, which commences on Jan 4th. The remainder on relationships, family, food and sleep. Intense, but fulfilling.
ZA: A History of Jewish Music includes a wide variety of music, from religious to secular, from Ladino, Klezmer, Sephardic and Israeli folk songs to contemporary Broadway music. It is necessarily a subjective, very personal collection of music. How did you decide what to include and what to exclude?
WW: Clearly, my own personal taste was crucial, as I wanted to share my own fun and rich experiences. Time was a factor, I hoped the evening would not exceed 2 hours and 15 minutes including interval.
ZA: To what degree was your collaboration with the Iraqi musician Ilham al Madfai an Eastern-Western cultural-musical crossover? Are there layers of Arabic and Jewish musical traditions embedded in the product of this collaboration? How did this collaboration come about? Why do you think they searched you out?
WW: In the early part of the program, I referenced these ethnic origins. It is a sincere wish of mine to celebrate the profound and joyful commonality of Semitic music, in a hope that through transcending language and politics, that music can find a way to unite and embrace the peoples of the much troubled Middle East. My collaboration with Ilham was entirely serendipitous and providence dealt me a wondrous hand on this occasion.
ZA: Your creativity has found expression in many different fields and genres. How do they impact on one another?
WW: My forte is ‘styles’, from theatre, zarzuela, Ladino, keystone, Chopin, impressionism, tango, township. Here I flourish and celebrate in the splendour and magic that is all music. They all inter-feed, and symbiotically nourish each other. For this reason, much of my work has been in musical theatre, where period, character and styles come to prominence.
ZA: You grew up in Melbourne, Australia, and decided to leave with a one-way ticket for Athens at the age of 21. Why Athens? Why just then? Why a one-way ticket?
WW: I had decided that the world was there for the taking. I had become stir crazy and had an appetite to sample the joys, cultures and mysteries of the world. Athens seemed a good starting point, and the one-way ticket meant there was no rush to return.
I have been away for 25 years, and now consider myself a citizen of the world. I return to 0z at least once a year, and see my family, and am happy to be there. But I am equally happy in Asia or Europe.
ZA: From the age of ten, throughout your childhood you composed music – how did your compositional style and musical taste and preferences evolve? What were the major changes?
WW: I begun with a love of Chopin, and then came a major change to pop, i.e. Cat Stevens specifically, then to jazz, McCoy Tyner and Oscar Peterson and then to major orchestral works. Stravinsky in particular. And then to theatre, and thus styles. I have never really contemplated doing anything with my life but for music.
ZA: Which composers or compositions have been major influences on your own work?
WW: Clearly Chopin is at the top of my list, and then the whole world…
ZA: How to you approach a new project, say, creating a musical or an opera from a play?
WW: I am keen to see the script, hear the ideas, see my production team, immerse myself in the characters and style, and period and then once I have cleared the decks, I work to deadlines with astounding speed, as ideas come flooding. I have never had writer’s block.
ZA: How do you decide if you take on such a project or not? What are you looking for, is it more of an instinctive or a rational decision?
WW: There are many factors but the personnel, the time frame, the budget, diversity are all key and mutually exclusive.
ZA: Could you describe the creative process while working on the Woody Allen project? And how was it received, when and where can it be seen next?
WW: I worked on this with great joy as the text was so rich and witty. The pieces were based o Woody’s late 70s writing for the New Yorker, and simply delightful. Setting Woody to music was a rare privilege indeed and I of course loved setting up here and then having it on in NYC.
ZA: What are you currently working on? And what would you like to be working on?
WW: My pet project deals with humour, sex, passion, fun, politics, scandal, and poignancy – key ingredients in any musical theatre pot. The piece is The Happy Hooker. It is a portrayal of Xaviera Hollander in her pomp in NYC in the early-mid 70s.
© Zsuzsanna Ardó and HASNotes
