Perhaps only one of the pieces of music selected by violinist Tamsin Waley-Cohen and pianist Cordelia Williams will calm the spirits enough to persuade somnolence to creep into the Southbank Centre’s Purcell Room on a rainy Saturday afternoon. Apart from Arvo Pärt’s Speigel im Spiegel (Mirror in the Mirror), the rest of the duo’s programme is unexpectedly lively, especially the last piece, Schubert’s Fantasia in C, D.934, which might wake up even the deepest sleeper.
Coming together to explore the “hidden labour” of mothers and caregivers awake in the middle of the night, Waley-Cohen and Williams, both mothers themselves, attest that while singing songs to coax their babies into sleep, they felt an ancient connection to mothers in the past doing the same things, singing similar lullabies across time and space. In the pre-show talk, they also discuss the worries they had in wondering if they could be both mothers and musicians. Their concert clearly demonstrates they can.
Pärt’s famous work at first seems a strange choice as its fragile melancholy suggests more than sleep: even solitude and death, when it was used in some of the trailers for Alfonso Cuarón’s 2013 film Gravity. However, the piano’s continual triads, along with the violin’s F major scales, have a soothing quality that reassures the otherwise haunting sounds that the two instruments produce. As Spiegel im Spiegel is often heard rather than seen performed, it’s fascinating to watch Williams’s left hand cross over the right to hit a single high note that sounds like a muted bell, a style Pärt named tintinnabuli. Leaning back on her stool with her left hand raised in the air like a sacrifice to the gods, William brings elegant drama to the piece.
Most of the other selections are more traditional than the Estonian composer’s minimalism. There is Brahms’s Wiegenlied (Lullaby), Op. 49 No.4, the quintessential lullaby, and Dvořák’s Songs My Mother Taught Me, though without a voice, it eschews the bittersweet lyrics. However, slotted in between the Dvořák and Schubert is a new work by Freya Waley-Cohen, the violinist’s sister. Sweet as plum wine, with a night sky of piano notes and the memories of an Irish fiddle, is based on a lullaby found on a 4,000-year-old Babylonian stone tablet, and Freya Waley-Cohen is careful to lean into its complexities.
The highlight of this afternoon concert, however, is Schubert’s Fantasie in C, D.934, the scurry of piano notes at odds with the plaintive violin. The final section sees both musicians working their socks off – but of course, in this concert, they wear chic pyjamas. Williams dashes off key after key on the piano while Waley-Cohen stands on her tiptoes to reach the high notes. It’s a thrilling way to end, and something that would be good to see again.
Let’s hope that the pair continues to work on the themes of motherhood in music and, possibly, in the future, explore the darker side of lullabies where cradles will rock and cradles will fall.
Reviewed on 6 June 2026
