Issy Ashton

Issy played in a Christmas concert I organised in 2019. She is a highly accomplished flute player, always delivering to a professional standard. I can warmly recommend her for her lyrical and energetic playing as well as her lovely personality.

An opportunity arose via a friend in her final year student at Cambridge University, to record any musical work, with the offer of a three hour recording session and subsequent editing as part of her final year work. With only ten day’s notice, I booked Issy Ashton and the pianist Joseph Cummings, who had barely enough time to work on the piece before the day of the recording. As an added pressure, on arrival at the studio one of the two recording engineers told me that the equipment would not work properly, so he left to rush home and grab his own mixing desk. By the time he had returned, the other engineer had just managed to get it up and running, but we now only had half the original time to rehearse and record! Issy and Joe had managed to meet up the previous week to run through the work; the challenge for both of them being that it is not a well-known work, so there were no previous recordings to listen to, and not a wealth of previous performances to weigh up and interpret. Each movement was rehearsed for about 15 minutes and then recorded; the first movement was recorded in three different sections to save time for the pianist, who had to rush back to London; the middle section being a flute cadenza. From my point of view, as the composer of the work, it was a very moving experience to hear Issy’s interpretation of the music. Although she had commissioned it when aged 15, she had yet not felt ready to do it justice and the sudden opportunity to make the recording meant a lot of preparation compressed into a fairly short lead time. Nonetheless it is a very good performance of the work as conceived, and an ideal recording to represent the ideals which Issy requested at the time of the commission, and which I realised in the composition. I have known Issy since she was a young beginner, but our paths had not crossed musically since she had left the area to study at the Royal College of Music. The standard of professionalism she brought to the recording session, coupled with her interpretation of the work, left me in no doubt as to her ability to hold her own in the flute world, so much so that I have arranged for the work to be orchestrated, with Issy publicly premiering it in November of this year, with a small symphony orchestra. Nick Planas, August 2020