Skip to main content

Viola Music

While resident in the US in 1919, Rebecca Clarke entered her Viola Sonata in a composition competition sponsored by patron of the arts Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge. Out of a field of 72 entrants, Clarke's piece was adjudged the joint winner, unluckily losing out via Coolidge's casting vote to Ernest Bloch's Suite for Viola and Piano, a similarly excellent piece. Something must have been in the water that year, as it also saw the publication of Paul Hindemith's wonderful Op. 11 No.4 Viola Sonata.

Might her career have flourished more fruitfully had she won? Perhaps, but the obstacles in her way were formidable: entrenched sexism; the demands of family life; persistent depression. Most of her major compositions date from the latter 1910's and the early '20s, with only sporadic creative episodes thereafter. I can't recall if I read about her work before hearing it or vice versa, but it was after listening to a movement from her Viola Sonata on BBC Radio 3 that I ordered this CD.

The Sonata is its main attraction, and the first work on the disc. It's followed by an assortment of smaller-scale pieces for viola and piano, such as the lovely song without words 'I´ll bid my heart be still'. The violist here is Philip Dukes, and the pianist Sophia Rahman. The final two compositions introduce other instruments: Daniel Hope on violin joins the duo for a plaintive 'Dumka', while in the slightly spikier 'Prelude, Allegro And Pastorale', Rahman's place is taken by Robert Plane on clarinet. The recording and performances are very good: it's an absorbing and rewarding disc.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Complete String Quartets

While the string quartets of Nikolai Yakovievich Myaskovsky (1881-1950) were all published in the Soviet era, a few of them had pre-revolutionary origins. Two quartets he wrote in 1911 and '09 while a conservatory student re-surfaced some twenty years later designated as Quartets Nos. 3 and 4.  An even earlier "schoolboy" piece was later re-worked more radically as Quartet No. 10, premiered in 1945. Myaskovsky partook of an ample share of the turmoil and tragedy of his times: he was wounded and shell-shocked after service on the front line in World War I, and his father, who had been a high-ranking military engineer, was brutally murdered by a revolutionary mob. Despite that, his music, even at its most sombre, hasn't the black bile or biting sarcasm of Shostakovich's, or of his friend Prokofiev's. Of the works collected here, in excellent early '80s performances by the Taneyev Quartet, only Quartet No. 1 has any significantly metallic tang of early S...

All Wrapped Up

Here's another of the compilation cassettes I bought this summer, having taken home a Denon twin-deck hi-fi cassette player from the local charity shop. All Wrapped Up is a 1983 compilation of singles by The Undertones, with Side One filled with A-sides, and B-sides on Side Two. A cassette must be the least desirable medium for such an arrangement, with a long rewind required if one just wants to hear the hits repeatedly. The Undertones were unapologetically provincial and anti-fashionable, with their songs sharply-written slices of life that pointedly avoided any mention of politics, or of the then-continuing violence in their native Derry. My favourite tracks are the obvious choices: 'Teenage Kicks', 'Jimmy Jimmy', 'Here Comes the Summer', 'My Perfect Cousin' & 'Wednesday Week'. Their later singles showed increased sophistication but lack the some of the straightforward charm of their earlier work. The B-sides, not unexpectedly, are mo...

Ein Schattenspiel, etc.

Georg Friedrich Haas is a contemporary Austrian composer of "art music". "Haas's style recalls that of György Ligeti in its use of micropolyphony, microintervals and the exploitation of the overtone series; he is often characterized as a leading exponent of spectral music" says wikipedia. Only a relative few of his many compositions have been issued on CD - many more of them can be found on YouTube. On this 2020 disc are three of his works in which standard classical instrumentation is augmented and altered by "live electronics". Two are string quartets and one is for solo piano. Is a string quartet still really a quartet if there are meanwhile some other people with laptops busily twizzling the sound? There is a live performance video of the 'String Quartet No. 7', the first work on the disc, where the JACK Quartet are supplemented by a trio of sound boffins to realise the composition. Whether it's properly a quartet or a septet is neithe...