I’d put on a podcast to try to distract myself from the world wavering disconcertingly around me, but I wasn’t really paying attention to it.

Based around Broad’s debut book Quartet (March 2023), this concert explores the work of four British female composers.Famed for her operas, this trailblazing queer Victorian composer was a larger-than-life socialite, intrepid traveller and committed Suffragette.

It is also a sweeping social history of the last century with intertwined themes of sex and politics, inspiring and shockingby turn.

Doreen Carwithen became the mistress of a better-known composer and after their marriage devoted all her energies to his career, which feels a like throw-back to the days of Clara Schumann.

I am especially interested in the roles that music and sound played in productions, and the way this impacts on how plays were interpreted. From hosting music festival coverage and the BAFTA Scotland Awards to presenting dozens of movie premieres Edith has incorporated her genuine passion for, and in-depth knowledge of, music and film in to her work. Broad paints vivid, at times over-imagined, pictures of all four women and the worlds in which they lived and worked. Pauline Viardot is “a famous contralto” for whom Gounod wrote “Sapho,” with no mention of her own operas.As Ethel’s story enters the late 1880s, we’re introduced to Rebecca Clarke, who grew up in Harrow, also with a domineering father who she had fight to follow her talent as a composer and violist. Both casts face similar questions of success, rejection and recognition that were (and are) part and parcel of a career in composition; for Nichols’ characters, winning the annual Prix de Rome became a fixation, just as gaining a broadcast on the shiny new BBC became for the members of Quartet. Broad, a musicologist at Oxford University, offers, instead, a stodgy buffet of adjectives that will satisfy neither expert nor enthusiast.