By Zach Collier
This brilliant UK composer is elevating classical music by infusing it with fresh perspectives born of modern musical trends.
To say Alexis Ffrench is a once-in-a-generation talent would be both cliché (because that descriptor has been tossed around so frequently in the world of music journalism) and an understatement. Most people do not know what it’s like to sit and converse with a mind that exhibits such profound intelligence. He has the kind of unbelievable abilities I’ve only seen in stories about Mozart – like when a young Mozart stole a sacred hymn from the Sistine Chapel simply by hearing it once and remembering it in its entirety when he got home.
While the respectful, family-focused Alexis Ffrench is certainly not the extreme provocateur that Mozart was, he was similarly born with remarkable talent. Talent that he’s further honed for decades through hard work and dedication. And, like Mozart was in his day, Alexis is articulate, stylish, and cool. He has collaborated with fashion brands like Miyake and Hugo Boss. He’s also deeply in touch with modern popular music trends and loves music in all its forms. This has made him an excellent host on Apple Music 1, where he takes a deep and fascinating dive into the world of classical music every Saturday at 10 AM PT/6 PM UK.
We’re able to discuss Kendrick Lamar just as easily as Béla Bartók. In our hour-long conversation, we discuss Rachmaninoff’s love of jazz, Ravel’s use of syncopation, and he even humors me when I pose my theory that Jazz (not Modernism) is the true successor to Romantic music.
When I speak with Alexis, he’s in his quiet studio in the Midlands. His studio is on a farm in the English countryside, only about two miles away from his home – which is a commute most Americans like me can only dream of.
“It’s very countrified,” Alexis tells me. “This is where I come to write and to be away from the family home – mostly so I can give them space from music.” His laugh implies that with his line of work, there’s such a high volume of music that breaks need to be had. “But it's really beautiful here. There's lots of sheep and cows, and it's very tranquil.”
His studio isn’t built for recording, and it’s not built for creating social media content. It’s built for one thing and one thing only: peace. Peace for Alexis. Peace for his family. Peace for his neighbors.
“I'm really grateful for this space. It's not lavish at all,” Alexis explains. “A lot of my colleagues have very large, lavish spaces with lots of hard wiring, but I record in real spaces with real people, with orchestras, and then do programming elsewhere. Really, all I require is a sense of peace from my room. And that's what this gives me.”
In speaking with him, I learn that Alexis is very mindful of his effect on other people. He doesn’t want to bother his family, and he doesn’t want to bother others on the farm with his craft. He composes and practices on a silent piano – a dummy piano that emits no sound. All day every day, Alexis sits powerfully in thoughtful but active silence.
“I practice in silence, never with sound, because the sound is always inside me,” he explains.
“And so there's never any external music. There's no sound at all. And even when I go on tour, I have a dummy piano that has no facility to even emit sound. So it's really only when I go on the stage where there's external sound that can be heard by others. I find it much more powerful to internalize sound.”
Alexis puts in grueling eight-hour days, focusing on the mechanical particulars of his craft. This work ethic sets him apart from many would-be virtuosos, and that work ethic is something most readers would be able to comprehend. But the silent composition – the ability to internalize rich, complex sounds without external stimuli – requires some explanation. It’s one of those extraordinary, Mozart-level gifts I certainly wasn’t blessed with.
You see, Alexis Ffrench was born with the ability to hear, process, recall, and spatially map the music he hears. “My first experience of being exposed to music in a practical sense was about four years old, when I was at the kitchen table, jamming to Stevie Wonder,” he recalls.
The wooden kitchen table was his instrument. I can tell he still has the kitchen table from his childhood firmly planted in his mind’s eye when he gestures during this story. “I didn't obviously know about stuff like perfect pitch, but I could hear all the sounds and I geographically traced a piano on the kitchen table. Not physically. There weren't any marks on it, but I could somehow make associations between what I was hearing and where it was geographically on the piano. So I used to jam away. And then when I was about four and a half, my parents got me a real piano. And then when they got me a piano, I could play the piano because of the kitchen table.”
Practicing in silence on a dummy piano in his farm studio, it's almost like he’s come full circle. But now, instead of learning and mapping external songs, he’s generating them. His heart and mind are a wellspring of music that’s built on his love of classical music, as well as his love of the soul classics that so stirred him at the kitchen table in his childhood home.
Sure, he’s the Artistic Director of the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music and a Governing Body Member and Trustee of the Royal Academy of Music, London. But while holding those prestigious positions, he’s flown in the face of institutional rigidity. He’s not one of the classical purists I encountered so frequently in my own university studies in America.
Alexis doesn’t treat any music – no matter the genre – like it exists in a bubble, or like there’s some form of “High Art” and “Low Art.” It’s all art being made by real people who exist in real time, and they influence each other.
“As our lives have become more complex and sophisticated and challenging, it has become politicized beyond all recognition,” he explains. “We see it with compartmentalization, categorization, and music that was once populist that is now niche.”
He explains that there have always been gatekeepers and elitists, using Voltaire’s writings on race around the time of black composer Chevalier de Saint-Georges as an example. “Despite everyone saying we have all this democratization of classical music and all this cool stuff happening here, it's still very binary. We still have the high art and we still have the ‘other.’ But to my mind, the most enlightened musicians of their day have always absorbed and embraced all music. You can find those moments which are just so heart wrenching and beautiful. I think with musicians who are enlightened, they have already crossed over and explored these other reaches.”
Alexis has a deep love of jazz, of soul, of hip hop. He’s been able to take those sensibilities and combine them with highly sophisticated and intelligent classical tastes to create something groundbreaking and fresh in the classical space. With 1.8 million monthly listeners on Spotify alone, he’s one of the top 10 most-streamed classical artists in the world. Like mainstream hip hop stars, he’s not afraid to collaborate with pop icons, as he did in 2022 with Leona Lewis.
His approach to collaboration feels very modern, even if his music is rooted in classical sensibilities. But that modern touch – the ability to shape his music to resonate with listeners in the modern era – has affected me personally.
For example: my wife just got out of a two week stay at the hospital. We’re currently working on our fourth kid, and this time around has been rife with very serious complications. I’ve recently experienced some of the lowest lows of my entire life wading through all this, and trying to make sense of the suffering and hang in there long enough to see the joyous end.
Two singles have been released from Alexis Ffrench’s upcoming record, Classical Soul Vol. 1. The most recent, “Together Without You,” feels like a grand realization that spurs your spirit to action. Like the climactic moment in a film where the protagonist is so moved that they decide to sacrifice everything and give their all for a noble cause. The longing and desire in this piece is palpable.
When I listened to “Once” for the first time – the lead single – I melted. It made me cry for the first time in a very, very long time. Clocking in at just over two minutes, it’s a simple, unassuming piece that’s rich and full of emotion. I told Alexis that I was probably projecting, but it felt like it captured the bleak but bittersweet realizations someone has alone in a hospital room. Turns out I wasn’t too far off.
“‘Together Without You’ is about immortality. It's about golden braids of connectivity through life,” he replies. “Whether that be memories, or people who have been lost. But it's about golden braided connectivity. The things that we lean on, that we derive comfort from.” When he explains this, he gets somber – lost in thought. “There's a beautiful poem by Clare Harner. The lines: ‘Do not stand at my grave and cry; I am not there. I did not die’ were just so moving. And I think particularly in the last couple of years where I've lost my father and my mother, I wanted to write something that speaks to that. But also, it’s not about death. It's about life. It's about, as I say, these golden braids of life that weave from the past, into the present and into our imagined futures as well.”
The story of “Once” is equally as moving. A very tender piece, it revolves around moments that only happen once in a lifetime that we reflect on infinitely.
“With ‘Once,’ I wanted to capture what I remember when I was with somebody,” he replies. “This really happened around the time of my last album, but these moments stay with you. I uttered something to this person, and it was something that I should have said before. But I uttered it once, and it's the only time in my life when I've said it.” It's a piece that Alexis says he wanted to be played and then somehow appear and then disappear into the ether. “I wanted it to be impossibly beautiful.”
He succeeded. It certainly captured a moment like that for me.
Capturing these universal moments is really the story of Classical Soul. There are some who may try to make this record about race simply because of the title and its ties to soul music. Alexis and I did briefly discuss a shared, global black experience and how that connects people across continents and acts as a unifying throughline within varied and individually distinct black cultural groups. But Alexis’ vision for this record is clear.
“This is very much a personal story, traced back to my relationship with music, to my parents, to to my very earliest memories of feeling connected to something spiritual. And perhaps most pertinently, my earliest teachers, as I saw them back then,” he says, referring to his cherished days at the kitchen table, jamming along to records made by his idols. “The Sam Cookes, the Aretha Franklins – there's this borderless universe of music. And I wanted to somehow trace that story musically, whether that be through the ten most tender pianistic moments – pieces imbued with with a timeless melody – but also a kind of hip hop-like device.
Occasionally you just hear flurries of all the other soul pieces, reinterpreted through a classical prism.”
The overriding message of Classical Soul Vol. 1 is that its themes are deeply personal while remaining deeply universal and relatable. It's borderless. It's not for one person or the other. While Alexis takes great pride in his identity, he recognizes that his identity is born of many facets. And while the world is trying to flatten many issues into false binaries, he seeks to use music to empower the whole person, wherever they may be or whatever they may look like.
“I consider myself a child of God,” says Alexis. “Throughout my life, I've always found myself being led by faith or my gift or the voice of my Father. You know, ‘This is the right thing to do. This is the right thing to do.’ We're all led by that in some capacity, so the album is a universal album. It has universal themes that I hope touch every single person out there. So there is a job to do, and it is part of my mission, I think, to ensure that everything that I do is totally, totally universal. My music, everything, everything that I am, everything that I do, is universal. I hope to embrace every single soul out there.”
This belief in the universal importance of every individual also impacts the way Alexis approaches education. Alexis was so generous as I asked questions about how to help some of my own piano students who have disabilities.
“I truly believe that it's everyone's right to have the gift of music in their lives in some way, somehow,” he says. “The only thing I can remember from my very, very early days is just immense love and generosity from my professors.” He told me about how one of his early professors approached his own unique gifts. There was ice cream after every lesson. A sense of total freedom of expression. A sense of safety. He would encourage Alexis to improvise, to explore, even as they were learning Chopin etudes. “Everything was just so fun. There was such immense freedom. There were no barriers. Of course there was rigor attached to everything. You know, as a craftsman or craftswoman, in whatever you're doing – building a house, flying an airplane – you want to know there's a certain amount of rigor that's going into that. But in music, rigor can take on many different aspects and complexions.”
Classical Soul Vol. 1 seeks to express and reinterpret the echoes born from the soul classics of the past, but with emotional and classical rigor.
“For me, that's high art,” says Alexis. “I like the idea of borderless universes, and multiple access points and many, many routes to entry. I think that there is a danger in extreme orthodoxy in classical music, and I'm not a fan of that. So anything that can reach people and move people and remove any barriers to entry are things that I'm a fan of.”
Alexis Ffrench and his team will be dropping singles from the new record periodically through the fall. One they’re particularly excited about is a collaboration with Congo Afrobeats artist Fally Ipupa, Pentatonix beatboxer and cellist Kevin Olusola, and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. “I wanted to do a kind of triple concerto,” Alexis smiles. “A kind of mirror – almost like a Beethoven concerto with me on piano and Afrobeats and Kevin with the Symphony Orchestra. It was thrilling to write and produce this track.”
Classical Soul Vol. 1 will drop in its entirety on September 20, 2024.
Make sure to follow Alexis Ffrench on Instagram and check out “Soar” below.