‘A jewel of a piece’: Tamsin Waley-Cohen remembers Oliver Knussen through his final composition

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This recording has been a long time in the making. It is ten years this year since Olly Knussen wrote and we premiered his Reflection. Tragically it turned out to be his final completed work.

It had been my sister Freya’s idea to ask Olly to write a piece for Huw Watkins and me. I had been awarded the ECHO Rising Star award, as Birmingham Town Hall and Symphony Hall’s nominee, and each winner could commission anyone they wanted to. That’s a pretty spectacular offer from ECHO, a once in a life-time carte-blanche. The only catch was that it had to be ready to premiere the following season, to tour to many of the ECHO halls across Europe.

Freya was studying with Olly, and Huw had known Olly, played his music, and worked closely with him for many years. Olly happened to hear me on the radio one day and my playing caught his attention. He also heard some of the musical experiments Freya and I were making with our sound and architecture installation in Snape called Permutations, and looked out some of my other recordings.

He had been unable to complete anything for some time, and many bigger and more prestigious commissions were still waiting. Freya had the instinct that to write something more personal and more intimate might be just what Olly wanted to do.

I had never met Olly at this point and was quite nervous about asking him, since he was one of the greatest composers alive, and known for the extreme precision and refinement of his ear and musical taste. I was afraid I wouldn’t be up to scratch for him. But since the time that we met, the warmth and encouragement he gave me has been an ongoing source of artistic sustenance to me, and a great help when the devilish voice of self-doubt becomes too loud.

I’ve been reading through our early emails and the kindness and openness from him catches me off guard again now, as it did nearly eleven years ago. He immediately writes that he likes the idea of writing the piece, but that it depends not only on what he called his ‘so-called schedule’, but also the need to ’get a good idea for it!’ Oh, the truth of the bumpy ride of the creative - one never knows if a good enough idea will come just when it’s wanted, and there’s no magic formula to guarantee that one will appear.

Over the next months, the commission was agreed, and we met various times, in Snape and in London. We talked extensively about music and folk music in particular. The wildness and precision, the never quite as expected complexity of the rhythmic games, the inherent rhetoric, the evocative sound worlds that transport the listener. We talked about Debussy, Ravel and Janáček in particular, and I know that the Debussy sonata was a particular point of inspiration for this work.

I knew enough of the creative process and how painstaking it could be for Olly not to pester him. But all the halls were getting rather nervous when August 2016 rolled round and there was still nothing from Olly. At the end of August we received the first page and a half, and then silence. It was mid September and I was at the Open Chamber Music International Musicians Seminar at Prussia Cove, with Huw, when suddenly, a fax came through to the office. We were overjoyed and wild with excitement. I couldn’t quite believe it. Every few days, another page or two would arrive, in Olly’s immaculate and miniscule hand, music bursting with luminescence and poetry.

Once we had the whole piece, there was about a week till the premiere in Birmingham, and no violin part. I begged Freya to make one for me (this was well before the ubiquity of iPad score reading) which she stayed up all night to do, finishing it on a red-eye flight home from the States. That’s still the part I use, and I could never have learnt the piece in time without her help.

Then I stayed up quite a few nights learning it. Huw and I felt a huge responsibility - we wanted Olly to like his new ‘baby’ and to agree that it could go forth into the world. We wanted him to write more music too! But this wasn’t a straightforward piece, it is tricky and delicate, full of complexity and lightly worn beauty. Huw and I worked hard on it, and I relied on Huw’s knowledge and experience with Olly’s music, as well as his prodigious score reading abilities, to prepare for our presentation of the piece to Olly.

We met at the Royal Academy of Music, and Freya turned the pages. It was a huge relief that Olly was delighted, made only a few comments and tiny alterations, and we all went out to dinner in celebration.

Huw and I have played Reflection now dozens of times around the world. It’s a piece that has become a part of both of us, and when I revisit it, it’s like opening the door to a dear friend. It’s a jewel, and its genius is such that we both still discover new delights in it now ten years on.

Tamsin Waley-Cohen and Huw Watkins perform on the album Reflection, out on Signum Classics on 6 February 2026.