Cantabile: Anthems for Viola
Jonathan Harvey (1939-2012)
Chant (1992)
Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958)
Romance for Viola and Piano
Bright Sheng (1955)
The Stream Flows (1990)
Arnold Bax (1883-1953)
Sonata for Viola and Piano (1922)
Augusta Read Thomas (b. 1964)
Song without Words
Benjamin Britten (1913-1976)
Lachrymae: Reflections on a song of Dowland, Op. 48 (1950)
Jordan Bak (viola)
Richard Uttley (piano)
rec. 2023, Greyfriars Kirk, Edinburgh, UK
Delphian DCD34317 [67]

If the sometimes arduous process of deciding which instrument to play leads you to settle for the viola you will be welcomed with open arms into your local amateur orchestra, but opportunities for solo work will be limited. Much of the available repertoire was composed for two great players of another era, Lionel Tertis and William Primrose. There seem to be signs of greater adventurousness on the part of composers today, however, and magnificent players such as Jordan Bak will provide further stimulus. Here he is with Richard Uttley, a superb keyboard partner, in a varied and deeply satisfying recital.

Jonathan Harvey’s unaccompanied Chant opens the programme. It begins with a held, low C sharp over which the composer weaves a variety of other musical elements, including many that must surely be fiendishly difficult to execute. Andrew Stewart, in an excellent booklet note, seeks to establish a link between this work and Harvey’s experience as a chapel chorister at school in Tenbury; well, maybe. Admirers of Harvey’s work will not be surprised to read that it is a fascinating piece, but at 3½ minutes it is too short to make much of an impression in its own right. It does, however, and perhaps surprisingly, serve as an excellent opener for the Vaughan Williams that follows. The Romance, 6½ minutes long, begins and ends in pensive melancholy with a rather anguished middle section. The manuscript, found only after the composer’s death, is undated. Stewart suggests that it might have been composed ‘as early as 1914’, which places is roughly contemporary with the first, unrevised, version of The Lark Ascending. The two works share some characteristics, but the Romance is the sadder piece. It was a real pleasure to make the acquaintance of this beautiful work from a composer one thought one knew so well. Jordan Bak and Richard Uttley do it justice.

Bright Sheng’s 5-minute unaccompanied piece, The Stream Flows, follows a similar trajectory to the Vaughan Williams, though more tranquil and less dark. Where Vaughan Williams’s themes evoke English folk music, Sheng’s piece is based directly on a folk song from the Qinghai province of China where the Shanghai-born composer was obliged to spend much of his adolescence. A few slides and an closing passage composed of a heaven-ward rising phrase with harmonics are subtle yet sufficient signs of the music’s national origins. The composer is quoted in the booklet as saying that ‘the sound of the viola should evoke the timbre and tone quality of a female folk singer.’ I don’t know to what extent listeners will feel Bak has succeeded in that aim, but he provides us with a superbly concentrated performance that, along with the work itself, creates a powerful and rather moving effect.

These three short pieces are followed by a major twentieth-century sonata, that by Arnold Bax, one of several works he composed for Lionel Tertis. The opening is immediately striking, the piano high in the treble ushering in the viola in that instrument’s low, rather throaty, register. The main theme of the long first movement is of the kind frequently described by Bax scholars as being of Celtic inspiration. Whether the untutored listener would immediately think so is debatable. No matter, the melody is used and developed extensively throughout the movement. The second movement is a fiendish scherzo that also contains more light-hearted episodes. The sonata ends with a somewhat lugubrious slow movement that winds its way to a tranquil and affecting close. Like much of Bax’s music it is a work that requires repeated hearings if the listener is to get the most out of it, and this magnificent performance encourages that enterprise. It is a darker and more imposing reading than that by Louise Williams on an EM Records disc, (review) and one that takes significantly more time over each movement. Williams is very fine on her own terms, however, and one learns a lot about the work by comparing the two performances. The sonata is very much a work to be played by two equal partners, and with Richard Uttley’s assumption of the taxing piano part we have here an example of truly collaborative music making. The recording team of Paul Baxter and Jack Davis have also done a superb job. The balance between the two instruments in the three accompanied pieces is, to my ears, perfect. (The same team was responsible for Brindley Sherratt’s excellent recital on the same label. I was less happy with the balance there, but remain conscious that such reactions tend to be subjective.)

Augusta Read Thomas’s Song without Words is the composer’s own adaptation, made for these artists, of a work that exists for several different instrumental combinations, 18 in all, and perhaps counting. The viola spins a singing line throughout, with contrasting interruptions from the piano, the two instruments therefore having quite different roles. Andrew Stewart writes that the music is ‘directly informed’ by a poem by E. E. Cummings. I have read the poem and will take his word for it. Bak and Uttley create just the atmosphere I think the composer is seeking, but I find the musical substance too thin to hold the attention for very long. Others might well find otherwise.

Andrew Stewart suggests that Britten composed Lachrymae in an all-night sitting, having forgotten about it and finding the deadline dangerously close. If true it confirms what we already knew about the composer’s extraordinary facility, the more so since it is a fine piece indeed, far from a routine piece of work. It is a series of variations, most of them very short, on Dowland’s song ‘If my complaints could passions move’. Britten was later to compose another set of variations on a Dowland song, his Nocturnal, Op. 70, for guitar, and a particularity of both pieces is that the theme is only heard at the end, and in Dowland’s original harmonies. In Lachrymae the statement of the theme is preceded by a vigorous passage that is as distant from Dowland as one can imagine, yet the seamless way Britten is transformed into Dowland is quite uncanny. There are several recordings of Lachrymae, some in the string orchestra arrangement Britten made subsequently. Many of them are very fine, but none, in my experience, is superior to this one. The viola writing is very varied, and, in deference to its dedicatee, provides many opportunities for the soloist to demonstrate technical prowess. The piano writing is challenging too, and a particularly striking aspect of the performance is how both artists express the inherent melancholy in the music, even in the more lively passages.

William Hedley

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