Girton alumnus, composer and pianist, Tim Watts (1997 Music) and Dr Martin Ennis, combined forces to perform at this year’s Roll concert. The programme included sonatas for piano duet by Mozart and Poulenc together with short character pieces by Charles Koechlin, a younger contemporary of Debussy.
Tim Watts (1997) studied Music at Girton College, graduating with first-class honours in 2000. After postgraduate study in Piano Accompaniment at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, he has gone on to develop a busy career as composer, pianist and teacher, currently holding positions as College Lecturer at St John’s College, Cambridge, and as a part-time professor at the Royal College of Music in London. He relishes the collaborative opportunities that Cambridge provides. His opera Kepler’s Trial, based on research by the St John’s-based historian Ulinka Rublack, was produced in 2016 at St John’s and staged the following year at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. This foray into the world of a seventeenth-century astronomer was followed by a residency at the Institute of Astronomy, during which Tim was able to work closely with the University’s Public Astronomer, Matthew Bothwell, to explore the potential for interaction between contemporary astronomy and music. His most recent piece is The Third Sea, which premiered at King’s Place in March, a ‘sea-voyage in song’ setting texts by Yehudah Halevi and featuring the composer as pianist alongside a team of some illustrious former students and Vanessa Paloma Elbaz, the Cambridge-based scholar of Jewish and Mediterranean musics.
Martin Ennis is Director of Music of Girton College and Associate Professor in the Faculty of Music, which he chaired for almost a decade. He studied in Cambridge and Cologne, returning to Cambridge to complete a doctorate on ‘Recomposition in the music of Johannes Brahms’. Brahms remains his principal research interest. In recent years he has given research papers in, among other places, Dublin, Bonn (for the German Musicological Society), Brescia, Gdańsk, Yale, Irvine (CA), Sydney, Auckland and Wellington. Publications include studies of autodidacticism and the gavotte (Current Musicology, 2019) and Brahms and endings (Musicologica Austriaca, 2020). Martin combines university life with a busy career as a performer. He is principal keyboard player of the London Mozart Players, the oldest chamber orchestra in the United Kingdom, and performs regularly with the Orchestra of St John’s and the Collegium Cartusianum (Cologne). Career highlights include conducting Girton Choir for an audience with Pope John Paul II, performing in the Monteverdi Choir’s 25th-anniversary concert, directing Messiah from the harpsichord in Beijing’s Forbidden City, playing one of his own compositions in a Prom, and a solo harpsichord recital in the Gdańsk Festival, for which he (re)constructed several fragmentary works by Mozart.
