Helping us to hear
If you were making your first disc, what would its centrepiece be? You could go the popular route – something safe and universally loved that would guarantee you an audience – or you could opt for the urgent, keening sounds of Witold Lutosławski’s Musique funèbre, the Polish composer’s homage to Bartok, completed in 1958. UK-based string group 12 Ensemble opted for the latter for their debut disc, Resurrection, in 2018, and that choice exemplifies the ambition and confidence of their music making. They do things entirely their own way, and at a time when classical music often feels battered and defensive prefer to go on the attack.
I meet their joint artistic directors Max Ruisi and Eloisa-Fleur Thom at the offices of their record label, Platoon, in the middle of a hipsterish set of studios in Camden, north London. Platoon is owned by Apple Music (which also recently bought Swedish label BIS), and a lot of the confidence of this enterprise comes from the fact that cash is not in short supply. Money doesn’t just talk, it can also help you explore less well trodden areas of the repertoire and present your findings with total self-belief.
Max Ruisi is a cellist, a product of a prodigious musical family (one brother, Roberto, was appointed Leader of the Hallé Orchestra in 2022; another, Alessandro, is first violin of the Ruisi Quartet). Thom is a violinist. 12 Ensemble is proudly conductorless and seeks to reach decisions collaboratively, but Ruisi and Thom are the artistic brain of the group, running the show from their flat in Hackney, life partners as well as musical partners.
Their latest release, Metamorphosis, is on the surface positively crowd-pleasing compared with the Lutosławski. Its cornerstone, as the album’s name suggests, is Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen, his work for 23 solo strings – 12 Ensemble naturally have to grow a little to play it. But the truly revelatory performance on the disc is of the late Canadian composer Claude Vivier’s Zipangu, a work for 13 strings written in 1980. It is quite extraordinary: astringent, discordant, at times terrifying (and hard to divorce from the self-destructive composer’s tragic life story – he was murdered by a young hustler in Paris in 1983), yet, as you listen more closely, strangely beautiful and alluring. “Once you attune your ears,” Ruisi says, “it’s straight-up conventionally beautiful.”
Helping us, perhaps forcing us, to open and attune our ears might be the mission statement of 12 Ensemble – and of the generation of thirtysomething classical musicians represented by Ruisi and Thom. “It feels so alien and abrasive,” Ruisi says of Zipangu, “but once you reach the end, the whole lower strings bit, heart-breaking as well.”
Ruisi and Thom met when they were music students – Thom was at the Royal Academy, Ruisi at the Guildhall – and quickly realised their shared interests. “It was chamber music and small ensemble playing that was really getting us excited,” says Ruisi. “We wanted to have a voice and have input, and that’s still important to both of us. We also realised there was all this incredible rep and this powerful feeling you get from mass strings. But it seemed to us at that time that the choice was either to join a symphony orchestra or play chamber music, and we thought that what we did really hit a sweet spot.”
“The group is a mix,” explains Thom. “Everyone has studied a bit in London but also in Europe.” The emphasis on “12” is a misnomer. Different pieces demand different forces, and the true core of the group numbers around six to eight – key principals who define the approach and the sound. Better perhaps to think of the number as reflecting its foundation date – 2012, when a bunch of eager musicians fresh out of college decided to go their own way.
Have the key players all stuck with the project? “We’ve developed as it’s gone along,” says Thom, “and everyone has their own life path. But we have a core of the same people. We started very much as a fun thing to do and the group has developed over the years far beyond what we could have dreamed at the time. We didn’t think of anything in a business way. It was all about the music, all about the people playing. We have a core of people and that obviously fluctuates at times [almost doubling in size for Metamorphosen], but that’s also exciting because even more ideas and more personality come into it.”
Not having a conductor was a founding principle. “We wanted to keep the chamber music aspect to it and be in charge of the music,” she explains. “You have to be very present in rehearsals and in performance. Everyone is as responsible as everyone else. We help to guide and direct, but the aim is to allow people to express what they’re feeling. We prepare a lot before projects of how we think we might want to shape the music, but we never set it in concrete. There are no bad ideas.” The aim is musical democracy, but within limits, given that true musical democracy might never arrive at a resolution.
Ruisi says he could have gone the conventional string quartet route – he plays alongside his brother Alessandro in the Ruisi Quartet – but he wanted something more. “We [he and Thom] were keen to have a chance to mould something in our own vision: the way of delivering music. To me being a musician goes way beyond practising and performing. There’s an artistry to the whole thing. We wanted autonomy over what music we’re playing, how we’re going to play it, how we’re going to programme it. Making a programme is sometimes just as artistic as performing. The idea of going along and being told to do this programme or that programme … well that’s fine, but why not have the chance to control that too?”
Their vision is not just bold but quietly revolutionary and rather inspiring. We met at a time of a torrent of bad news in the classical music world, with the travails of ENO, the Cheltenham Music Festival, Dartington and the proposed closure of the music course at Oxford Brookes University, and here were two young musicians – Ruisi is 36, Thom 35 – proposing a total makeover for the artform, and doing it with the complete self-confidence of gilded youth.
“Classical music is big art,” says Ruisi. “It needs to be back in the same conversation as film stars and philosophers, and you can do that without diluting it. People find that really challenging with us, because they see that we do new music and we do Strauss and Beethoven, and they ask ‘Well, what are you?’ “ This refusal to be pigeonholed or consigned to a museum, and to do things in a distinctive, highly personal way, is refreshing, and may point a way forward for an industry which needs to find a new, evangelical sense of purpose and to express it with complete freedom.
“This is something on the minds of everyone from our generation of musicians,” says Thom. “We don’t want this to seem like a dying art. We want to draw audiences in and change the perception by being ourselves and having a personality.” They had no worries about kicking off their recording career with a challenging piece of Lutosławski. “We were young and optimistic,” says Ruisi. “It’s just music we enjoy playing.” That also applies to their collaborations with pop performers such as Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood. “We genuinely love his music, and don’t see an issue with it.”
“You can exist in all these spaces at the same time,” Ruisi insists. “There are loads of great classical works and they don’t have to be messed around with.” Schubert’s Death and the Maiden quartet was the main piece on their second disc, in an arrangement for string orchestra they did themselves. “We are disappointed when we get reviews and they call us the ‘edgy new music people’. Yes we do new music, but we love Bach, we love our Dowland arrangements, we love Shostakovich, we love Beethoven. It’s all music we believe in deeply, and we’re just going to try and realise it with as much honesty as we can.”
Their reputation for championing new music is, though, far from misplaced, and they particularly enjoy developing relationships with living composers, notably Oliver Leith. “We’ve become partners in our careers now,” says Ruisi of their collaborations with Leith, with whom they worked on his opera Last Days, which was well received when it premiered at the Royal Opera House’s Linbury Theatre in the autumn of 2022.
Ruisi believes the success of Last Days, which was inspired by Gus Van Sant’s 2005 film based loosely on the death of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain, shows what can be achieved if classical music displays imagination and self-belief. “It’s a good example of what is possible,” he says. “It became quite a big, culturally significant event – in fashion, in literature and in the visual arts. Everybody was talking about this small opera in the Linbury Theatre. That made us go ‘Wow! This is what we should be doing.’ “
They are wary of gimmicks – playing concerts in car parks or warehouses for instance. “We want to get people back into the concert hall rather than take classical music out of the concert hall and put it on in a field,” says Ruisi. “That’s fine and we’ve done bits of that in the past, but what would be really cool would be to get people excited about going back into the concert hall, where these pieces sound amazing.”
Ruisi and Thom do all the business planning themselves and have no agent. “There are moments when we question ourselves and our sanity,” says Ruisi. “We’ve had managers in the past, but it just didn’t work out. Such a big part of this group is the artist-led personality coming through. They were trying to squeeze us in spaces and it never felt like us.”
Despite, or perhaps because of, resolutely doing their own thing, they are riding the crest of a wave. “We don’t get any funding,” says Ruisi. “We’re not reliant on any public or private money. We don’t do a season. We just do a few things that we want to do really well, and it’s working. We do some film scores that we want to do, and that helps us stay afloat. That’s been our model, and people have come to us. We’ve done three Proms and now have a residency at Wigmore Hall, which gives us hope that you can do exactly what you want and still succeed.”
Metamorphosis is released on digital and vinyl on 1 March. The works on the disc will be played on that day at a concert at LSO St Luke’s, London EC1. Platoon will also release an album of Oliver Leith’s opera Last Days on 5 April
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