A Bafta-winning composer talks to Christopher Morley about guiding a choir to success.

Ilona Sekacz, half-Polish, half-English, raised in Blackpool, had a memorable (if chequered) few years as an undergraduate at the University of Birmingham in the mid-1960s.

She changed her course several times, with various permutations of music and drama, as she tells me from her Edge Hill home, near Banbury, then never actually took her degree.

“I left university and went down to London, where I had jobs in banks, and shops and various things. Then I got a job at the British Film Institute, and from that I saw an awful lot of films, which led me to an enormous love of film music.

“When I left there I was already composing for little productions in children’s theatre.”

That has grown into an immense corpus of credits for films, the Royal Shakespeare Company, the National Theatre, and many more besides, plus television series such as Dalziel and Pascoe.

Ilona was a contemporary of mine at Birmingham and I tell her I always get a buzz whenever I see her name as the credits roll.

Though she flatteringly insists that mine was a more illustrious career, it is her work that has yielded an unexpected financial reward.

“That was quite a surprise when that started to happen. I had no idea. In television or film suddenly you’re getting royalties and money comes to you that you feel you haven’t really earned.

“If the programme gets repeated, then you get paid again. There was a very nice period in the 80s and early 90s, when I felt I was really very well rewarded for something I didn’t think I deserved.”

With this amazing amount of scores she has composed I ask if she feels there is any overlap or, like Handel, a temptation to borrow from herself.

“No, I find it’s always much easier to start with a blank piece of paper, and a blank mind, really. Trying to alter things and rework them is a lot more effort, trying to make something else fit where it wasn’t intended.

“Because of the dialogue or pictures or script, you get ideas as soon as you look at them and as soon as you read them. You want to research the background, to immerse yourself in that period, that time, that emotion. It’s much easier than starting with something that already exists and fiddling around.”

Ilona’s next big venture is as music director of an amateur choir singing at the end of Carlos Acosta’s latest production, Premieres Plus, to be seen at Birmingham Hippodrome this week.

On this occasion the BAFTA award-winning composer has not provided the score.

“No, that’s written by Morten Lauridsen, and it’s called O Magnum Mysterium, about six to seven minutes. I coached the choir, and helped Imagineer (the Coventry based production company) to form the choir,’’ says Ilona.

“The programme that Carlos Acosta is doing is a series of newish ballets, and he and his onstage partner do, I think, about nine different pieces. The scenario includes this piece, which is the only piece which has live music, a cappella.

“It’s very good that he decided to do a work that has a chorus as a finale to the evening. It’s quite challenging for this chorus, which is completely amateur and some of them have never sung on stage before.

“We’re 38 altogether, we’re about a quarter men and about three-quarters women, and they come from three different regions.”

Ilona had formed three choirs and readied them to perform locally prior to taking a 150-strong group from Coventry to London as part of Imagineer’s spectacular Godiva Awakes project for next year’s Cultural Olympiad.

It was the showcase for the Birmingham group which resulted in them being recruited for Acosta’s production.

“We did three groups: one in Coventry, one in Birmingham, and one in Ombersley in Worcestershire. I coached each group for 10 weeks and at the end we had to do a local concert. They’d learnt three or four songs and had to perform them, sort of not too stressful!

“The Birmingham group performed at the Hippodrome – where they allowed us premises for rehearsal – in the bar there just before the Blues Brothers show. We used music from the show and dressed up like the Blues Brothers.

“The man who runs the Hippodrome came to one of our performances (we just did two in a day), and thought we were quite good.

“So when the Carlos Acosta management said ‘We’d like to come and perform here, and by the way, have you got a community choir?’, he thought of us. Which I thought was really, really risky. It’s a real tribute to the way the choir has gone.’’