Sugar and spice for a ballet

Composer Claire Cowan has always collaborated across art form boundaries. When choreographer Loughlan Prior asked her to compose the music for his new ballet, Hansel and Gretel, it became one of the biggest collaborative projects of her career to date. Her brilliant orchestral score has just been released on a new album, beautifully packaged in a pop-up version for Christmas.

Composer Claire Cowan

Photo credit: Garth Badger

Why did the collaboration work so well? One of Cowan's friends suggested that Prior is "kind of like the boy version of Claire." She agrees they are kindred spirits. "What Loughlan does with his choreography is what I do with my music; we're very similar spirits, very playful, interested in the magical side of theatre and dance and how we can make alchemy with our artforms."

A year ago that alchemy delighted nearly 30,000 ballet fans when the Royal New Zealand ballet toured Hansel and Gretel around New Zealand. In the light and witty production the well-matched music and dance shared what Cowan calls “a cheeky wink” kind of humour, a “delicious kind of campness”. The children in the audience might not get the humour the way their parents do, she suggests, “but of course everybody gets the slapstick.”  

Prior and Cowan first developed a new version of the Hansel and Gretel narrative. “I didn’t like the fact that so many fairy-tales have evil stepmothers, and then there’s the witch – we didn’t need two female antagonists.” Gretel is the heroine of their story, a feisty big sister who looks after her younger brother. “I try to have a strong female lead in all my works,” Cowan says. “And having the witch as a drag queen was Loughlan’s idea.”

Cowan has specialised in writing music for film in recent years. At the 2020 New Zealand Television Awards she won the award for Best Original Score for her music for Runaway Millionaires. Her first TV series soundtrack for Hillary won her an APRA Silver Scroll Award in 2017 and this year she was again a finalist for APRA’s ‘Best original music in a series’ award for the TVNZ series One Lane Bridge.

 She brought that film-score lens to the ballet project, but was aware that while music for film plays a supporting role the composer comes first when writing music for ballet. At the same time, Cowan wanted the music for Hansel and Gretel to have a cinematic flavour.  The ballet’s costume and set designer Kate Hawley underlined this approach with a 1920’s ‘early silent film’ aesthetic.

The Sandman scene from Hansel and Gretel

Photo credit: Celia Walmsley

Cowan and Prior worked out parallel working processes for the development of the full-length 100 minute ballet, with a lot of “back and forth”. The approach was very satisfying for Cowan. “I’d write a minute or two a day, send him clips for review and he’d come back and say ‘perfect!’ or ‘can you double it?’ He never said ‘shorter’, it was always ‘more, more, more!’” she says, laughing.  Sometimes Prior would work with the dancers the next day and send footage back. “That was awesome, such immediate gratification as a composer.”

From the very beginning in the Overture there’s darkness and menace lurking beneath her sprightly, cheerful music. She achieved this through clever use of key and instrumentation. “I think I did that intuitively,” says Cowan, “using major and minor keys. I wanted the music to be dark because the story is quite dark. But we both wanted it to be constantly moving, with a lot of pace. There are themes for each character, one for Gretel, and then a Hansel and Gretel theme. And the witch’s musical world is very entrenched in early Broadway styles, with jazz and Charleston.”

The appealing sweetness of the music is never too sugary; as in good gingerbread, it’s balanced by the spice of unpredictability. Though she listened to ballet composers like Tchaikovsky and checked out The Nutcracker while preparing for the project, Cowan agrees that the Stravinsky of The Soldier’s Tale comes closer to her musical style. “I do love him!” she says. “The ‘Killing the witch’ scene has Rite of Spring moments as well, with the accents. I like giving a little nod to composers who’ve inspired me.”

Cowan’s orchestration is wonderfully inventive and she always avoids cliché with tongue-in-cheek lightness. Brassy bravado accompanies the children’s entry into the forest, woodwinds become birds, violin and harp solos are poignant and romantic. The percussion section plays a major role, light as a music-box for the Sandman, lugubrious alongside the tuba, quirky with pots and pans in the Witch’s kitchen and always multi-coloured in the many musical surprises.

A stylishly packaged “pop-up” CD for Christmas

The recording of the score for CD release has been one of Cowan’s major projects this year, a process inevitably disrupted by pandemic lockdowns. The NZSO donated fifty of its players but after two of the eight recording days planned at Wellington’s Stella Maris Chapel, everything ground to a halt when Auckland suddenly locked down in August. With flights cancelled, Auckland-based Cowan was stranded in Wellington and eventually drove home. She made six more trips before all thirty tracks were laid down and her costs ballooned, exceeding the budget for which she’d crowd-sourced through a Boosted funding campaign.

Now, on the brink of the album’s launch, Cowan confesses to being exhausted – but happy she’s invested in the project. “The CD took over my life for a lot longer than I’d intended and interrupted a lot of other projects. I’ve sacrificed a lot for it. But even if it gets into the hands of one other ballet company and they do a production, it will have been worth it.”

Meanwhile a limited edition of the stylishly packaged double CD and a digital version are available and would make a great family Christmas gift. And there’s a bonus track – Cowan commissioned a “Hansel and Gretel Bedtime Story” from writer Amy Mansfield. The droll rhyming verse is read by actor and comedian/vampire Jonny Brugh, accompanied by music from the ballet, creating a magical contemporary fairy-tale for all ages.

Royal NZ Ballet’s Hansel and Gretel, Music by Claire Cowan performed by the NZSO, conductor Hamish McKeich (Independent release). Buy here.