About
Elowen Hart is a violinist from Painswick, in the Cotswolds — a recitalist and concerto soloist known for unhurried programmes, and for the Marchmont Edition, her slow republication of the violin music of Sylvia Marchmont (1889–1966), played back into repertoire one sonata at a time.
She grew up above a wool town's high street, in a house where the radio was always on and always classical, and learned the violin from the church organist's sister until she was old enough to take the bus to Cheltenham. London took the next decade: college, a quartet that lasted three years and taught her everything, and the slow discovery that what she wanted to play best was recital repertoire nobody was asking for.
The asking changed in a county archive in 2021, when a librarian put a brown folder of manuscript in front of her: three violin sonatas by Sylvia Marchmont, a composer she had never heard of, unplayed since the fifties. She has spent the years since editing, recording and touring them — not as a rescue mission, she insists, but because the slow movements are better than most of what she was already playing.
Her recital partnership with the pianist Deniz Aral began at a festival green room over an argument about tempo, which neither of them has conceded. They play thirty concerts a season together, most of them in rooms that seat two hundred or fewer, on the theory that chamber music is a conversation and conversations do not carry.
Instrument
She plays a violin by Tomaso Ruggieri, Cremona 1698, on loan from the Fenwood Trust — an instrument she describes as having opinions of its own about Brahms, most of them correct.
Positions
The Marchmont Edition
Edits and publishes the violin music of Sylvia Marchmont from the manuscript sources — a sonata a year, each launched with a recording and a recital tour.
Weldon College of Music, London
A class of eight, taught on the principle that a phrase you cannot sing is a phrase you do not yet understand.
