Composer Hannah Kendall.
In Tuesday’s (7/30) New York Times, Steve Smith writes, “Hannah Kendall, a prominent young British composer based in New York, was … reading Robert Schumann’s letters, which provide glimpses of a decades-long struggle with mental illness, diagnosed during his life as exhaustion, and posthumously as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. ‘It felt as though there was a very direct, personal connection to his state at the time, which I found particularly fascinating as a composer,’ Kendall, 40, said in a recent interview at Lincoln Center—where her new work, ‘He stretches out the north over the void and hangs the earth on nothing,’ will premiere on Aug. 9. The Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center will play Kendall’s piece on a program that also includes Schumann’s Second Symphony…. What it takes to be an artist today, Kendall explained, is a regular topic of discussion among her circle of friends and peers…. Kendall was urged to read Schumann’s letters by a longtime friend, the conductor Jonathon Heyward, the music director of the Festival Orchestra … He had her commissioned to write a piece for a concert that would also feature Schumann. He envisioned Kendall responding to not only Schumann’s music, but also issues of mental health and this moment.”
