In the key of flat-out major

She's fast, she's prolific and audiences love her work. Composer Elena Kats-Chernin explains why she works so ferociously hard

studio portrait of composer Elena katz-Chernin CR ADAM KNOTT Picture: Adam Knott

She's fast, she's prolific and audiences love her work. Composer Elena Kats-Chernin explains why she works so ferociously hard

THE room where Elena Kats-Chernin works is high-ceilinged and spacious, with a cosy, lived-in quality. The walls are a cheery yellow, there are dark floorboards, a deep, comfortable sofa and, at the far end of the space, shelves laden with an untidy profusion of papers. Up against one wall is an upright piano, a somewhat battered Kawai, second-hand when bought in 1994. It's "very cheap, cheap, cheap; loud and noisy, but I love it".

A handful of pens lies at one end of the keyboard and sheets of paper are held together with brightly coloured plastic clips in the shape of musical motifs. The effect is relaxed and unpretentious, but also quite revealing. Kats-Chernin's offbeat wit and sense of fun are suggested, but also her slight removal from the everyday world.

"She still has that wonderful sense of the inner child," says her friend and occasional collaborator, choreographer Meryl Tankard. The Australian Music Centre's chief executive John Davis affectionately describes her as "just a little bit mad, in the nicest possible way". And the Sydney Opera House's head of theatre and dance, Wendy Martin -- a huge fan and a friend -- says the composer is "an artist in the true sense of the word. If she really has to leave the house she will, but music is her great joy. When she's got the pressure of six works on the run, it's what she wants to do. Anything else is a distraction."

It's from here in suburban Sydney that Kats-Chernin, 52, produces -- no, pours out -- the music that has made her one of the country's leading and most versatile composers. If you watched the opening ceremony of the Sydney Olympics you heard her music in the ravishing Deep Sea Dreaming sequence; if you're a fan of Phillip Adams's Late Night Live program you hear her theme introduce it; if you listen to ABC Classic FM her compositions fit into just about every timeslot.

Her latest work, a new 90-minute chamber opera titled The Rage of Life, opens at De Vlaamse Opera in Antwerp today, with performances in Ghent and Rotterdam in May and Stuttgart in November. It has been a huge undertaking, although by no means her first work of this kind. Kats-Chernin has written three other substantial music-theatre works: odd, then, that she describes herself as "probably a miniaturist".

It's perhaps best to describe Kats-Chernin as an astonishingly swift and prolific composer who works in just about every form for a wide audience. "She's ideal from an artistic point of view, very responsive to performers and their needs," says Davis. "From a publisher's perspective she's a dream, with an output that can be exploited. Not many people can produce at that level and that quality."

She hasn't written a symphony, but that's about it. Solo pieces, quartets, chamber works, oratorio, ballet, large-scale orchestral works -- four in the past year alone while, remember, she was writing The Rage of Life -- miniatures lasting only a couple of minutes and commissions from festivals, orchestras and private individuals are all in the mix. Then there are the little things, such as a song she wrote recently for a young singer, just eight or nine. "It took me a day; that's what you do in between."

Kats-Chernin relates all this -- and the above list is by no means exhaustive -- in a non-stop stream of conversation full of warmth, charm and laughter, albeit tempered with just a hint of melancholy: her life has not been without its sorrows.

There is, above all, a sense of unstoppable energy. At one point she scribbles a little bit of music, pen flying across the paper to leave a rakish trail of plump, black marks. They look ready to leap off the page of their own volition, impatient to be heard.

Never mind that she's labouring under a heavy cold and has been working on The Rage of Life from first light or earlier until late at night. "Sometimes Elena hasn't gone to bed," says one of her copyists, Julie Simonds, who helped prepare the performing edition of the opera. "She's throwing things to me at 4am and I am replying."

The Rage of Life -- its protagonist is a young man searching for his lost love while fighting for his ideals -- was a project that dropped into Kats-Chernin's lap. De Vlaamse (Flanders) Opera wanted something to appeal to a younger audience and commissioned the multi-talented Igor Bauersima to write the libretto, direct and design it. About the only thing he appears not to do is compose, so the net was cast widely for someone to produce the score.

Kats-Chernin's was one of the names put forward and, although Bauersima didn't know her, the dramaturge at De Vlaamse Opera had seen her music-theatre work Iphis (written in 1997) and liked it. Bauersima listened to some CDs, met Kats-Chernin and decided a collaboration could work. "Elena translates emotions, thoughts and scenes into music with so much understanding and justice, with her very distinct voice and with great mastery," he wrote in an email to Review some months into the process. "I'm very lucky that I can work with her."

The two worked long-distance, via much emailing and Skyping, until mid-March when Kats-Chernin flew to Antwerp for rehearsals. Bauersima apparently works hours as long as Kats-Chernin's. "He doesn't sleep, it seems," she says. "You write and he answers, at 3am, 4am." There really wasn't much alternative: Kats-Chernin didn't get the libretto until August 24 last year ("all 47 pages of it; it's not a short libretto") and they wanted the score by October.

She managed to get the vocal score -- it runs to 202 pages -- written by November 11. Then came editing. "Our limit was 90 minutes. I had 105 minutes, so already it's a cut version," she says playfully. "In 100 years it will be revived and performed as a premiere of the whole performance." Then came the "laborious, tedious" slog of orchestration for an ensemble of 18. Some of it was even done in airport lounges, airport-lounge music providing a less than welcome backdrop, as Kats-Chernin was on her way to and from performances of her work in Perth and Hobart. "I think the full score comes to 650 pages. I remember trying to orchestrate 30 pages a day."

By mid-January that was done, then there were a few more weeks of editing.

This bare description doesn't begin to encompass all that's involved and has continued to be involved during this month's rehearsal process -- the sketches, the changes, the decision to take different paths, the discussions with the writer and the conductor -- but gives a sense of the size of the endeavour, completed in less than six months.

Such speed is unusual and can be traced to her Russian schooling. "It's not much remarked on," says fellow composer Andrew Ford, "but Elena is without a doubt the best-trained composer in Australia."

Kats-Chernin was born in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, in 1957 but moved to the city of Yaroslavl, on the Volga, when she was four. Her mother was a doctor and her father an engineer; she has an older sister, Larissa. Elena was extremely slow to start speaking but, at the age of four or five, she was able to copy instantly what Larissa had learned on the piano. After that her development sped up.

Her life at that time was almost entirely given over to music. "From four to 14 I was doing figure-skating as well, which I hated. I'm not a sportsperson. I was skinny, I was bony, I didn't look so great. My legs were funny. I was never strong, and I fell a lot."

She remembers "always carrying things: music books and skates, which were wet. I hated it. It was very cold: minus 30 sometimes. I used to love the announcement on radio: `Today, minus 35. Children under the age of 10 don't have to go to school.' `Yes!' We even had minus 40 once. Everyone didn't have to go to school that day."

At 14 Kats-Chernin went to Moscow, alone, to study at a music academy whose rigorous, "incredibly thorough" curriculum developed students who, at the end of their studies, simply didn't have to think about anything relating to music; it was absolutely and fundamentally embedded in them.

"Those Russian conservatories go from boot camp to finishing school. So she can hear and write anything with great ease," says Ford. "Perhaps this accounts for her way of working, which is to compose pieces very quickly -- sometimes overnight -- then rewrite them completely, often more than once. The idea [to me] of writing it all through several times seems bizarre. Then again, I don't have Elena's facility and can't work as fast as she does."

Kats-Chernin's parents migrated to Australia in 1975 to join relatives and the 17-year-old was delighted to come with them. She had no thought of staying in Russia: "I was very excited to leave. Because I left [Yaroslavl] to go to Moscow, in some way it made me less of a person who holds on to things. I can easily get up and live somewhere else. I've done it a few times. I like to get up and go, if I know where I'm going to."

After study at the Sydney Conservatorium with Richard Toop she did indeed get up and go, as a scholarship student to Germany to study with Helmut Lachenmann. She stayed for 14 years, during which she married, had her three sons (now aged 24 to 28), and divorced. She has been back in Sydney since 1994.

Kats-Chernin had always composed, even as a child, but she dates her mature career from the mid-1990s. "My concert career is really only 15 years [old]. Because I write quickly people think it has been longer. There's so much music," she says. "I write all the time. It's something I have to do. I'm not really that interested in anything else. I do like to spend time with friends or my family. But this is all I have. I have my partner [international lighting designer Alexander Koppelmann], who I love, but there is nothing else I like doing.

"I don't like cooking, I hate cleaning, I just think, thank god there's something I really love. I love sitting in front of the piano and composing. Maybe one note isn't enough, but put two notes together and you can create something pretty amazing. Having three notes you can create a masterpiece if you're lucky. Having three chords can sometimes make a hit; you just don't know until you've done it. Every day there's this search."

Kats-Chernin almost always works to commission, although in between -- she always seems to find some in-between time -- she will revise pieces for different combinations of instruments. "Her catalogue is very complicated," says Davis drily. (Which is why if Kats-Chernin isn't writing music she's sorting out "boxes and boxes of sketches" bound for the National Library in Canberra.)

Versions of Russian Rag are often requested, probably because it's one of Kats-Chernin's most recognised works. Some will know it from the soundtrack of Adam Elliott's film Mary & Max, but earlier than that it exercised many rusted-on fans of Radio National's Late Night Live. The show's theme music had been some soothing Bach, but after interviewing Kats-Chernin and playing some of her music, Adams decided to make a change, and the brassy, woozy theme has topped and tailed the show for a decade.

Confusingly, it is in fact called Why Not?, and is a short version of the earlier composition Russian Rag, which Adams sometimes uses as the spirit moves him.

Typically, Kats-Chernin created Why Not? in a matter of moments for a CD she was recording in Karlsruhe, Germany, called Unceremonious Processions. The ingredients were a slightly too little amount of music for the CD, some leftover studio time and a tired trombonist who had, for some reason, put his empty water bottle and mutes into the open piano. When Kats-Chernin played around with the Russian Rag melody, there was a "chunky, harpsichordy" sound she liked. In six minutes they had the basis of a piece; Kats-Chernin added clarinet and, in her whimsical fashion, called it Why Not? "I can't believe it's still going strong."

Also still going strong is Eliza Aria, from the Tankard ballet Wild Swans, commissioned by the Australian Ballet for performance in 2003. A suite from Kats-Chernin's score was recorded by the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra and the shiny, bell-like vocalise for soprano was picked up for a Lloyds bank advertisement in Britain. It became a huge hit, going to the top of the iTunes chart, and -- the true sign of success -- was given a remix by an English DJ.

She'd worked with Tankard before, on the opening ceremony of the Sydney Olympics, and says the choreographer brings out the best in her (they are working on another project at the moment). "I love dance more than anything. It's my favourite genre. I see dancers move and it's like they're writing my piece for me. I used to play piano -- my first job -- at Miss Halliday's ballet school in Haymarket [in Sydney]. My very first job in Australia. Sorry, my second. My first was two weeks in a milkbar. I think I sold someone a frozen hamburger. Every Saturday for five hours I was playing for these kids. I was very happy, helping my family.

"I've known all my life what I wanted to do," she says. Her parents, now deceased, were entirely supportive, although like most parents would have liked her to have the possibility of a regular salary to fall back on. But she doesn't want that. "It's too comforting. I don't like to know how much money I have. It keeps me on edge."

The mix of edge and fun evident in Kats-Chernin's person spills over, naturally enough, into her music. Asked about her personal tastes, she cites an early love for Scriabin and always for Ravel, Bach and Schubert. Then she throws in French smoothie Michel Legrand: "He does such great harmonies, modulations you don't expect; stunning and haunting." His music reminds her of the "strange Russian pop music of the 50s" her parents used to listen to. "I sometimes like to try to reinvent that sound."

Not unusually for a composer, she loves strings, but not always of the conventionally classical kind. There's an electric guitar in The Rage of Life; in last year's Golden Kitsch, written for percussionist Claire Edwardes, a toy piano featured. It's an instrument Kats-Chernin likes very much. "I think people have enough sombre stuff in their lives and fun is good," she says.

Vivid colours and textures are another characteristic: "I don't like to have too much spare sound. I like to have richness of overall sounds, vibrancy of sound, different registers," she says. It's something audiences find appealing. "The public really enjoy her music," says TSO managing director Nicholas Heyward. "They can relate to it."

Stephen Adams, Australian music unit producer for ABC Classic FM, says Kats-Chernin is heard on most of the network's slots. "We program her a lot. The reception to her music is enthusiastic. It connects easily and well with a lot of audiences, partly because most or all of her music has a very strong feel for the body, for dance and movement. People understand and respond to that. She can also be complex and sophisticated," he says.

Composer Gordon Kerry captures something of the eclecticism of Kats-Chernin's approach in his description of Iphis in his book New Classical Music: Composing Australia. Iphis, he writes, is "hugely entertaining" with "a whiff of Bayreuth, some feral klezmer and more than a hint of old Berlin". Kerry also says she has "an impeccable sense of timing for the unexpected sound or gesture, and the material never outstays its welcome".

Alongside the playfulness, however, there is also -- always -- a touch of darkness. The burgeoning of Kats-Chernin's career has coincided with a chronic illness suffered by her second son, Alexander, and she can't escape a sense of guilt. He has schizophrenia, "a terrible, terrible illness . . . in the beginning it was a shock. It changed my music, changed my attitude to life. Even now I don't like going to parties because everything I enjoy I feel I shouldn't be enjoying. I need to lead my life by working hard, enjoying life with my family and friends and not beyond that, because that would be unfair to him. He's in my mind all the time."

She refuses to let it paralyse her. "He teaches me a lot of things; life is precious," she says, and so she works and works and works, with many commissions and projects on the boil at the one time as well as performances to attend, among them the Stuttgart Rage of Life performances in November and, in August, the Cabrillo Festival in Santa Cruz, California. She will be a composer in residence there and Cabrillo's artistic director, Marin Alsop, will conduct her Heaven is Closed, from 2000, on the last day of the festival.

Right now, in Antwerp, she's in her element. She sends emails detailing the adjustments and changes that come with seeing a work in rehearsal: the need to put in some music here, take some out there, change an accent, clarify a beat, tweak to suit a particular singer or musician. It can be done only on the spot and it's typical of Kats-Chernin's generosity that she would think to send reports at such a busy time.

And there's something more: the need to squeeze the best and most out of her time and talent.

"I know I'm not that important. When I'm gone no one will miss me, apart from my family and friends," she says. "While I'm here I can leave something."