Encircling
Rebecca Clarke (1886-1979)
Passacaglia on an Old English Tune (1941)
Kalitha Dorothy Fox (1894-1934)
Viola Sonata, Op 7 (c. 1925-27)
Marcelle Soulage (1894-1970)
Viola Sonata, Op 25 (1919)
Hélène Fleury-Roy (1876-1957)
Fantaisie, Op 18 (publ. 1910)
Daphne Gerling (viola)
Tomoko Kashiwagi (piano)
rec. 2022, Voertman Hall, University of North Texas, Denton, USA
Acis APL53974 [52]

This is a valuable Anglo-French selection of viola works, three of which, at least, will be unfamiliar to most readers. Rebecca Clarke, the most prominent of the composers, is represented not by her Sonata but by her much smaller and less challenging Passacaglia on an Old English Tune. It balances the last of the four, a Pièce de Concour by Hélène Fleury-Roy, and introduces the two sonatas performed, though I’m sure I won’t be alone in regretting that the Clarke Sonata was omitted because, at 52 minutes, there was certainly room for it.

The Passacaglia, which lasts over five minutes, is played with eloquent power and is finely paced. Greater demands, expressively speaking, come in the sonata of Kalitha Dorothy Fox. By one of those flukes, the name of this obscure British composer, who committed suicide at the age of 40 and of whom no photograph is known, was on my mind because I’ve very recently reviewed Peter Mallinson’s viola disc in which he played her Chant Élégiaque, Op 6.  The Viola Sonata, dedicated to her brother, was broadcast in 1927 from Bournemouth and marked a notable endorsement of her chamber music by the BBC. 

The Sonata shares a characteristic with Clarke’s – they sport central fast movements – but Clarke was a violist so her piece bristles with virtuoso figuration and demands. Fox, so far as we know, didn’t play a string instrument and her writing is gentler in that respect and makes more physical demands on the pianist. It’s a fluidly lyric piece, harmonically conservative, but with an undercurrent of French impressionist influence. Her Scherzo is almost as compact as Clarke’s own, though it cleaves to the quicksilver side of things and isn’t as passionate, whilst her finale, starting with rolled piano chords, supports a lyrical viola line that embraces folk-like elements. It offers a satisfying close to an emotively self-contained sonata that might not be truly distinctive but nevertheless has attractive features. Much credit must go to Daphne Gerling and Tomoko Kashiwagi for playing it so finely. This is its world premiere recording.

The other sonata is that of Marcelle Soulage, composed in 1919, the year that Clarke’s Sonata tied for first prize, with Ernst Bloch’s Suite, in the Berkshire Chamber Music competition sponsored by Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge (Bloch won, after much debate). The last time I encountered this work (she later wrote a solo viola sonata in 1930), I described it as “strongly rhapsodic-impressionist with Franckian hints, harmonically fresh and lyrically verdant. The Scherzo is in the best French traditions droll and witty and the slow movement circles quizzically for some time before finally settling. Darker matter seems to permeate the finale, but it soon resolves light-heartedly in cyclic fashion.” This was in the recording of Hillary Herndon and Wei-Chun Bernadette Lo for MSR Classics in which everything had been composed in 1919. I’d only add that some of the piano writing can be rather thick in places and that the Acis performance seems a touch more melancholy than the MSR. 

The final work is Hélène Fleury-Roy’s Fantaisie, Op 18, published in 1910 but probably written somewhat earlier, as a competition piece for the final performance examinations at the Paris Conservatoire. Rather like Enescu’s famous Pièce de Concert, written for the 1906 examinations – it’s possible that Fleury-Roy’s was as well – it makes considerable technical demands but ones that are framed in a ten-minute narrative offering rich interpretative rewards.     

Once again, Gerling and Kashiwagi are outstanding ambassadors for this body of music, they’ve been finely recorded, and the booklet is first class. In fact, I only have one final word of complaint and that’s nothing to do with the performers – the gaps between the pieces are far too brief. 

Jonathan Woolf

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