Jamie Howe, viola and Jamie Cochrane, piano
Saturday 28th March, 7.30 pm
Britten: Lachrymae, Op 48
Telemann: Fantasia for Solo Viola no 7 in A-flat
Clarke: Sonata for Viola and Piano
interval
Rowland-Jones: Wiegenlied Variations
Brahms: Sonata for Viola and Piano in F minor, Op 120, no 1
Coates: First Meeting (Souvenir)
Programme notes by Julian Davis
Benjamin Britten (1913-1976)
Lachrymae: Reflections on a song of John Dowland, Op 48 (1950)
Benjamin Britten died 50 years ago, and although we know of him as a composer, conductor and pianist, he also played viola and composed several pieces for the instrument. This music was written in 1950, while Britten was working on his opera Billy Budd, and was inspired by John Dowland’s song If my complaints could passions move, published in 1597. He dedicated the work to William Primrose, the Scottish violist, and they performed it together at the Aldeburgh Festival later that year. Britten made a popular arrangement of the music for viola and string orchestra, and this beautiful original version is less often heard. It is a set of variations, sometimes spare and ghostly, sometimes eloquent and moving, and reaches a rewarding resolution when the full theme of Dowland’s song is finally played by the viola at the very end.
Georg Philipp Telemann (1681-1767)
Fantasia for Solo Viola no 7 in E-flat, TWV 40:20 (1735)
Telemann was one of the most prolific composers of the baroque period, writing over 3000 compositions, and he published much of his own work with income from subscriptions. He had initially studied law, but switched to a career in music and worked as a music director in various German cities, finally living in Hamburg, where he wrote this piece. He was a friend of his contemporaries Bach and Handel. He wrote a lot of chamber music for various combinations, but especially solo pieces without a bass part. He printed his collection of Twelve Fantasias for Violin without Bass in 1735, but this example works very well for the viola. It has four short sections, marked Dolce (sweetly), Allegro, Largo, and Presto.
Rebecca Clarke (1886-1979)
Sonata for Viola and Piano (1919)
Impetuoso: Vivace: Adagio – Agitato
Rebecca Clarke was born in Britain and studied violin at the Royal Academy of Music and then composition with Charles Villiers Stanford at the Royal College of Music, his first female composition student. She started studying viola with Lionel Tertis, and worked in various chamber groups and orchestras, becoming in demand as a viola virtuoso, and one of the first female professional violists in London. As a composer she had a special feeling for chamber music, and this sonata is one of the best known of her works.
She wrote the viola sonata in 1919, when she was 33. She entered the work (under a pseudonym) for a composition competition organised by Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, the American pianist and chamber music patron. It tied in first place with a Suite for Viola by the Swiss composer Ernest Bloch. The jury was taken aback to find that the composer ‘Anthony Trent’ was in fact a woman, and Rebecca Clarke became well known as a result.
There is a quote at the start of the piece, from La nuit de Mai, by Alfred de Musset:
Poète, prends ton luth; le vin de la jeunesse
Fermente cette nuit dans les veines de Dieu.
[Poet, take up your lute; the wine of youth
is fermenting tonight in the veins of God.]
The music has a passionate and dramatic style, harmonically ambiguous, with rhapsodic outbursts and hushed poetic reverie, sometimes reminiscent of Vaughan Williams, sometimes of Debussy and Ravel. The first and third movements are bold and ambitious, and flank a brilliant and delicate second movement, a fleet-footed scherzo. The piece has become a firm part of the viola repertoire, and has been recorded many times.
Simon Rowland-Jones (b. 1950)
Wiegenlied Variations (2008)
Simon Rowland-Jones was the founder violist of the Chilingirian Quartet and teaches at the Royal College of Music in London. His Wiegenlied Variations are a set of variations on the well-known lullaby by Brahms. In Britten’s Lachrymae variations, the Dowland song was heard at the end, but here the Brahms lullaby is heard in the middle, split into two parts by a central variation that is the climax of the piece.
Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)
Sonata for Viola and Piano in F minor, Op 120, no 1 (1894)
Allegro appassionato: Andante un poco adagio: Allegretto grazioso: Vivace
In the early 1890s Brahms was feeling old (at nearly 60) and was resolving to write no more music so he could enjoy a carefree old age. But fortunately for us he had a change of heart and spent his last few years writing a series of beautiful works: in addition to four sets of piano miniatures, he was inspired by the clarinettist Richard Mühlfeld, to write his clarinet trio and quintet, and then two clarinet sonatas, Op 120, numbers 1 and 2, his last pieces of chamber music.
The two sonatas were written in 1894 and arranged by Brahms for viola the following year. There were hardly any viola sonatas before this, but the mellow viola sound works really well in Brahms’ late style, indeed Rebecca Clarke herself described Brahms as having ‘a particular affinity for [the viola’s] intensely personal tone – sombre yet glowing, reserved yet eloquent’. The viola part is similar to the original clarinet line, but has some subtle differences: the viola line is often an octave lower than the clarinet version, exploiting the sound of the viola’s low C-string, there is double-stopping, and sometimes the melodic line is extended.
The piece opens in F minor with a feeling of weight and strength, with long yearning melodies. The next two movements are in A flat, the relative major key, a beautiful song-like slow movement, followed by an intermezzo in the style of an Austrian Ländler, a gentle waltz. The final movement switches to F major, and the bell-like opening three notes are heard again and again in different guises throughout an exuberant and youthful-sounding rondo.
Eric Coates (1886-1957)
First Meeting (Souvenir) (1941)
Eric Coates started his musical career as a violist, but turned to writing light music, which became very famous, for example By a Sleepy Lagoon (think Desert Island Discs) and the Dambusters March. He wrote this charming miniature in 1941 for the violist Lionel Tertis.