Nicola LeFanu, prominent among Britain's woman composers, noted both for her strong lyrical style and her exploration of the use of microtonality, employed all these skills in abundance in the world première of her new piece A Phoenix for Carla at this year's Spitalfields Summer Festival. I was attracted to this work due to its being billed as portraying a theme connected with the London Riots of 2011, which lends itself to drama as well as an examination of underlying sociological factors. However, leaving aside these wider considerations, the piece was in fact a microcosm, devoted to a highly sensitive expression of empathy for the plight of flautist Carla Rees, whose Croydon Flat had been entirely destroyed by fire along with all her possessions in the August 2011 riots, it being in close proximity to the tragic burning down of the 144-year old House of Reeves furniture shop much displayed on our TV News channels at the time. Carla lost at least 10 flutes, including two Kingma Alto flutes specially made for her in the Netherlands on which she had based her international contemporary music career as leader of the digital acoustic Ensemble Rarescale, centred on bringing new music for Alto Flute to a wider audience. When interviewed in The Independent nearly a year later Carla commented on the aftermath: ‘I have good days and bad days, keeping going is the main thing. I'm really trying to focus on the positive but there's a deep sense of hurt in the middle of me which doesn't go away. An experience like this is like a reset button on your entire life’.
