Brief Encounters
Peter Mallinson (viola)
Lynn Arnold (piano)
Shirley Turner (violin)
rec. 2023, St Peter’s Church, Boughton Monchelsea, Kent, UK
Meridian CDE 84677/8-2 [2 CDs: 138]
There’s something here for everyone – assuming you like the viola and enjoy a jaunt, collecting nuggets as you go. I was sceptical when the twofer arrived, partly because of the profusion of miniatures and the number of arrangements and transcriptions, but it won me over.
There are so many different composers – many British – that it would be wearying to go into detail into each, but a number of names took my fancy. One of the most extensive pieces is Ruth Gipps’ Jane Grey, a rhapsodic pastoral portrait that darkens and curdles dramatically, finally to resume its serene reflectiveness. Her Lyric Fantasy is both more compact than the earlier work and more advanced, in its satisfying sense of resolution. Vitězslava Kaprálová’s Ritournelle is a tart and playful work and one of her last. Tartness is also part of Nadia Boulanger’s musical armoury, as she shows in the third of her Three Pieces, but there’s also a warm late-Romanticism here too.
Programming Rebecca Clarke after James Friskin makes personal sense as well as musical, given they were married. The former’s Elegy – swaying melancholy fused with upbeat lyricism – contrasts well with Clarke’s ever-beautiful I’ll Bid My Heart Be Still, which works well on viola but better, I think, on cello. The great violist Vadim Borisovsky contributes a whirling Tarantella. Julia Simpson, who must feel somewhat lonely as the only living composer, is represented by The Tunnel, which uses Suicide in the Trenches, a poem by Siegfried Sassoon, as its central idea. It plays off questions of innocence and experience, where jazz-influence and lyricism become muddied or else tread water. Alison Dalrymple was a cello teacher – she taught Jacqueline du Pré and Julian Lloyd Webber – and her Lullaby is a slight, charming piece.
Dorothy Howell, like Ruth Gipps, is getting more and more recordings. Boat Song is for solo piano, a clement study, which is finely played by Lynn Arnold. Amy Beach’s Romance was written for Maud Powell, the pioneering violinist, and is here transcribed for the viola by Courteney Grant. More Americana comes via bandleader James Reese Europe, always of curiosity for those intrigued by proto-Jazz, in the form of Queen Louise and Castle House Rag – which includes some rhythmic punctuation (whose foot or hands?) – in these arrangements for viola and piano by Peter Letanka.
The second disc offers Zemlinsky’s earliest pieces to have opus numbers, three delightfully spry works ending with another Tarantella. Known for her songs, Muriel Herbert is represented by two of them arranged by Simon Rowland-Jones, deftly chosen as the first is refined and the second fluidly athletic. Rosemary Glyde was a violist in her own right but died young in 1994. Her Whydah Fantasy is a narrative, a tone poem, in effect, that describes a shipwreck in 1717. It conveys both the majesty but then also the elemental forces ranged against the ship and ends in a final panel of angularity that makes me want to know more about her music.
The chamber music of Percy Hilder Miles has been recorded recently by MPR but here we have, like Muriel Herbert, two of Rowland-Jones’ arrangements of his songs, one reflective, the other unsettled. Both are war-focused. Francis Purcell Warren was younger than Miles but died at 21 on the Somme in 1916. His Five Short Pieces were composed for cello but are heard again in an arrangement for viola. These are pleasant character sketches that gather in depth as they develop. There is melancholy in the fourth, So Seems It In My Deep Regret, and the bell chimes that irradiate the final A Sunday Evening in Autumn can be read (retrospectively, admittedly) poignantly.
The American Tom Wiggins was black and blind and born into slavery. His Rêve Charmant is a nocturne for solo piano – a fluent pièce caractéristique – whilst Michelle Taylor-Cohen has arranged his Water in the Moonlight for piano trio (Shirley Turner is the violinist). One of W H Squire’s quicksilver cello morceau is here – the lithe Danse Rustique of 1895. It’s been recorded by Naxos in an all-Squire disc. As part of the interweaving interrelationships spread throughout the twofer one encounters Cecil Forsyth’s unpublished and rather stern Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright which was dedicated to Rebecca Clarke. I enjoyed Taylor-Cohen’s arrangement for trio of Billy Mayerl’s early and romantic Shallow Waters. Kalitha Dorothy Foxwas wholly unknown to me. The wistful Chant Élégiaque was composed for cello and published in 1921 but sits well for the viola. She killed herself at 40. Finally, there’s Kai Mortensen’s The Laughing Violin arranged as ‘The Laughing Viola’ – well, violists need to laugh now and then – by Dan Jenkins. This was, as Peter Mallinson’s notes tell us, a piece made famous by Tom Jenkins, star of the BBC Grand Hotel broadcasts. He was also a Carl Flesch pupil, by the way, and a dazzlingly fine player undone by cigarettes. At least one of his performances of this survives and it’s certainly not like Dan Jenkins’ naughtily witty reworking.
So, this is a kaleidoscopic survey of … well, what exactly? It’s rather, I think, a selection of small pieces of various kinds – morceau, character studies, narrative poems, song transcriptions, trenchant virtuosic studies, romances and love songs, with a Ragtime infusion. Does it all add up, given the number of transcriptions? Well, Lionel Tertis transcribed a swathe of music and that body of music certainly worked and continues to work and so does this selection.
Bravo to all concerned, to Mallinson and Arnold in particular, and to the well-judged acoustic and recording. In view of the convincing performances, I am not going to mention that the booklet’s composer notes don’t reflect the discs’ running order, so you will turn back and forth trying to find what you’re listening to. I know this happens, but it frustrates me. But, no, that’s a bad way to end. Mallinson should record Cecil Forsyth’s Viola Concerto and in transcription, if necessary, some H Waldo Warner.
Jonathan Woolf
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Track listing
CD 1
Ruth Gipps (1921-1999)
Jane Grey, Fantasy for Viola and String Orchestra (or piano), Op 15 (1940)
Vitězslava Kaprálová (1915-1940)
Ritournelle, Op 25 (1940)
Nadia Boulanger (1887-1979)
Three Pieces (1911-13)
James Friskin (1886-1967)
Elegy (1912)
Rebecca Clarke (1886-1979)
I’ll Bid My Heart Be Still (1944)
Vadim Borisovsky (1900-1972)
Sicilian Tarantella: Volcano
Julia Simpson (b.1977)
The Tunnel
Alison Dalrymple (1890-1959)
Lullaby
Dorothy Howell (1898-1982)
For Myfanwy (late 1960s/early 1970s)
Boat Song for Solo Piano (1920)
Alexandre Dubuque (1812-1898)
Tarantella arr. Vadim Borisovsky
Amy Beach (1867-1944)
Romance, Op 23 (1893) trans Courteney Grant
James Reese Europe (1881-1919)
Queen Louise arr Peter Letanka
Castle House Rag arr Peter Letanka
CD2
Alexander Zemlinsky (1871-1942)
Three Pieces (1891)
Muriel Herbert (1897-1984)
Two Songs: To Daffodils (1916) and Tewkesbury Road (1919) arr Simon Rowland-Jones
Rosemary Glyde (1948-1994)
Whydah Fantasia for Solo Viola (1992)
Percy Hilder Miles (1878-1922)
Two Songs: In Flanders Fields and Flanders and England arr Simon Rowland-Jones
Francis Purcell Warren (1895-1916)
Five Short Pieces
Tom Wiggins (1849-1908)
Rêve Charmant (Nocturne) for Solo Piano
W H Squire (1871-1963)
Danse Rustique, Op 20 No 5
Thomas Wiggins
Water in the Moonlight arr violin, viola, piano by Michelle Taylor-Cohen
Cecil Forsyth (1870-1941)
Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright
Billy Mayerl (1902-1959)
Shallow Waters (1936) arr Michelle Taylor-Cohen
Ruth Gipps
Lyric Fantasy (1955)
Kalitha Dorothy Fox (1894-1934)
Chant Élégiaque, Op 6 (1921)
Kai Mortensen (1908-1989)
The Laughing Viola arr Dan Jenkins
