SOLA: Music for viola by women composers

MUSIC FOR

VIOLA

BY WOMEN COMPOSERS ROSALIND VENTRIS

SOLA

MUSIC FOR VIOLA BY WOMEN COMPOSERS ROSALIND VENTRIS

1 Grażyna Bacewicz (1909–1969) Kaprys Polski ** [3:10]

Arr. Rosalind Ventris

Lillian Fuchs (1902–1995) Sonata Pastorale

2 I. Fantasia [4:34] 3 II. Pastorale [7:22]

4 Amanda Feery (b. 1984) Boreal * [7:11]

5 Sally Beamish (b. 1956) Penillion * [6:27]

6 Elisabeth Lutyens (1906–1983) Echo of the Wind, Op. 157 [7:39]

Elizabeth Maconchy (1907–1994) Five Sketches

7 I. Molto moderato – Più mosso [1:51] 8 II. Allegro deciso – Meno mosso [2:21] 9 III. Andantino [2:07] 10 IV. Poco lento [2:59] 11 V. Presto [1:40]

Rosalind Ventris and Delphian Records acknowledge with thanks the generous support of the Fidelio Charitable Trust, The Nicholas Boas Charitable Trust, The RVW Trust, City Music Foundation, and Wyastone Trust, as well as the following individuals: Carol Nixon, Elspeth Arden, Ciara Higgins, Ilyoung Chae, Elena Urioste, Hugh Mather, Catherine Maddocks, Helen Charlston, Orlando Jopling, Deborah Kelleher, Niall Hoskin, Benjamin Ealovega, Yolanda Bruno, Maria Fort, Malcolm Creese, Mark Clowes, Margorie Waite, Elizabeth Hilliard, Susanna Ingram, and other supporters who wish to remain anonymous. Rosalind also wishes to thank her former teacher, David Takeno, for his inspiration and guidance over the years.

Recorded at Wyastone Concert Hall on 19-21 December 2020

Original 24-bit recordings mastered by Delphian Records

24-bit digital mastering: Paul Baxter

Design: Drew Padrutt

Booklet editor: Henry Howard

Portrait photography: Oxford Atelier

Delphian Records Ltd – Edinburgh – UK www.delphianrecords.com

Imogen Holst (1907–1984) Suite for Viola 12 I. Prelude [3:07] 13 II. Cinquepace [2:13] 14 III. Saraband [3:34] 15 IV. Gigue [1:45]

16 Thea Musgrave (b. 1928) In the Still of the Night [4:56]

17 Thea Musgrave Light at the End of the Tunnel * [1:34]

Total playing time [64:40]

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* premiere recording ** premiere recording in this arrangement

I have always had a particular affection for the viola, with its beautiful dark tone-colour and its unlimited expressive range.

– Elizabeth Maconchy

I was drawn to a certain melancholy of the viola and a sparseness in its sound. The unique C string of course evokes a rich warmth, but the instrument, for me, conjured up a vast sense of space.

– Amanda Feery

It’s easy to imagine that the putting together of a programme – for concert or recording – is an abstract procedure of simply gathering nice repertoire. But there are so many factors, practical and even coincidental, that lead to a line-up as vibrantly unusual as this one. ‘Well, it was a pandemic,’ Rosalind Ventris begins, ‘and over the lockdown period I worked on a range of unaccompanied viola pieces. As well as turning to more familiar works such as unaccompanied Bach, I tried to see this as an opportunity to expand my repertory too – to take some time to explore some music that really shows what the instrument can do. Given we spend so much time in the middle of a group, in the middle of the texture, it’s not every day that we hear the viola on its own.’ And then there was the business of choosing what to play. Some pieces she had known since she was a child: she attended the premiere of Sally Beamish’s Penillion, for instance. The score of Lilian Fuchs’s Sonata Pastorale was discovered in a heap of music that Ventris was given by

a retired professional; and she has spent a great deal of time combing catalogues and resources to track down less well-known repertoire for her instrument, which yielded several other gems for this programme. The result is a richly varied line-up of twentiethand twenty-first-century music for solo viola from Poland, Ireland and Britain, from 1930 to 2020 – a project which Ventris built ‘out of a desire to commit interpretations to disc and highlight some wonderful music – that just happens to be by women composers’. And those composers are or were, in many cases, also professional string players themselves.

Grażyna Bacewicz was a brilliantly successful violinist and composer who spent much of her career split between her home country of Poland and Paris. A student of Karol Szymanowski and Nadia Boulanger, Bacewicz composed prolifically (over 200 pieces in total, including four symphonies and seven violin concertos), won countless awards for her music, and even contributed a cantata to the 1948 Olympic Games. Her Kaprys Polski (Polish Caprice) of 1949 was originally composed as an encore work for her own violin performances, though it offers a particularly effective introduction to the viola’s impressively wide, colourful range in Ventris’s arrangement. The music begins low and mournful, sobbing and intense, before suddenly taking off and zipping up the strings for a rousing, stomping dance to the finish.

Also of Polish descent but a native of New York, Lillian Fuchs, too, began her career as a violinist but switched to the viola in her mid twenties and quickly won tremendous success on her new instrument. (The distinguished Dutch conductor Willem Mengelberg, hearing her play only shortly after she had transferred to the viola, apparently offered her the principal’s seat of the Amsterdam Concertgebouw on the spot. She graciously declined.) She toured internationally as a soloist, was the first violist to record Bach’s solo Cello Suites on her instrument, and had new works written for her by a number of composers including Bohuslav Martinů. Alas, Fuchs herself wrote very little, and the Sonata Pastorale of 1956 is her only solo concert work for viola. The opening Fantasia has a broad chordal introduction, after which the music gradually gains momentum in a sinuous line that curls up and around itself in little semitone shifts and scales. The Pastorale begins slowly and gently, its long-breathed lines recalling the semitone movements of its predecessor – but after lulling us into a sense of peace, the music abruptly changes tempo and time signature and powers off into a sprightly, urgent Allegro. The slower tempo returns just as suddenly, ushering in a recall of the Fantasia’s first few phrases, before we return to the Allegro for a rousing, chord-laden finish.

The inclusion of Amanda Feery’s Boreal (2010) was prompted by a personal connection:

she and Ventris taught together at the Royal Irish Academy of Music. Feery’s evocative piece was inspired by watching Werner Herzog’s 2007 documentary, Encounters at the End of the World, exploring the lives of those who live and work in Antarctica. Feery recalls, ‘At one point in the film there are scenes of the most otherworldly undersea footage looking up at sheets of ice and shafts of sunlight beaming down onto the seabed. I thought of this idea of jagged ice, space, and warmth. Boreal moves between these colours, textures, and places like stepping through different fields. Harmonically I was also drawn to the connections between folk string music of Ireland and Nordic countries, the open intervals and grain of the strings evoking the expanse and subsoil of the Tundra.’ The music shivers and slips across the page, the player constantly varying the weight of bow pressure, conjuring images of sliding icescapes and pale bright skies.

Sally Beamish’s Penillion (1998) is a show-stopping competition piece which challenges the performer to display a wide array of techniques and textures across its six and a half minutes. Beamish is herself a virtuoso violist, and Ventris delighted in the bold opening of the piece, which is marked ‘declamato’: ‘I’m here! Not afraid to be a solo violist.’ The title refers to a form of Welsh extemporised singing: ‘The singer improvises a sort of counterpoint while a harpist plays

several stanzas of a well-known melody. The singer only states the melody at the very end.’ The piece is full of pizzicato writing, ringing bowed chords and singing lines, coming to a gentle close with the underlying melody that Beamish has chosen, a Welsh tune called ‘Gwenllian’s Repose.’

Elisabeth Lutyens and Elizabeth Maconchy were almost exact contemporaries and studied side by side at the Royal College of Music in the 1920s. But their musical approach – not to mention their careers –could not have been more different. By 1939 Lutyens was experimenting with serialism in her concert works, whilst writing a huge number of radio and film scores to support herself and her family. Echo of the Wind, Op. 157 was written towards the end of her life, in 1981. She had composed a Viola Concerto and solo Viola Sonata in the late 1930s and 1940s, and had studied the instrument whilst at music college. But this late work was composed for violist Paul Silverthorne – or rather, for his instrument, an Amati viola (a ‘friend of a friend’, as Lutyens put it in her dedication). Silverthorne described the process of working with Lutyens, who quizzed him at length over the feasibility of her writing. ‘Can the viola play such and such a note?’, Silverthorne recalled her asking – ‘and to my lasting dismay I would hear myself reply, “Write whatever you like, Liz. I’ll find a way to play it somehow.”’ Ventris has clearly fallen in

love with the writing, but freely acknowledges that it’s the hardest piece on the programme, full of special effects. The score is littered with instructions for the player: the ghostly whispers of sul ponticello playing (the bow being used ‘on the bridge’ to create a glassy, ethereal sound), whistling harmonics, and tapping col legno as the bow wood bounces across the strings.

Elizabeth Maconchy’s Five Sketches were written just over a year later in 1983. A prolific writer for both chamber ensembles and amateur groups, Maconchy enjoyed a distinguished career and was the first woman chairman of the Composers’ Guild of Great Britain from 1959. The individual Sketches in this set are untitled save for their tempo markings, but they are distinctive in character: rhetorical, bouncing and dance-like, elegiac, passionate, scampering and puckish. Through constant variation of tempo and time signature, Maconchy’s music feels supple and fluid – another benefit of writing for an unaccompanied instrument, where breath and bow can steer the direction of the musical line without needing to lock directly into the rhythms of another part. The second sketch seems reminiscent of the music of Béla Bartók, whose writing Maconchy much admired; and like Bartók, she binds the movements together using a single tone as a musical ‘home’. This is the low E with which the first piece begins, and which recurs often at the opening or close of each movement.

The initial idea for this programme came from a solo concert that Ventris was asked to give at the Dublin International Chamber Music Festival in 2020, and this accounts for the large number of British and Irish composers on the disc. Imogen Holst is among them. It is only very recently that Holst’s compositional legacy has received any serious consideration: as amanuensis to Benjamin Britten for many years, as well as helper and biographer of her father Gustav, her considerable reputation as a copyist, researcher, arranger and conductor has tended to overshadow her own creativity. Yet she composed a great deal of original music, from chamber works to choral and orchestral works, brass band suites, and a ballet based on the story of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice called Meddling in Magic. And, in 1930, she wrote this Suite for Viola.

keeps the dancing spirit of that style, she gives her violist an unequal five beats per bar – literally five steps – as opposed to the even six beats across which a courtier would expect to make his five moves in a galliard. The closing Gigue gallops along with frequent moments of pizzicato punctuation and a whistling harmonic at its close. The Suite was premiered in 1931 as part of the Macnaghten–Lemare Concert series, an enterprise established in 1932 by violinist Anne Macnaghten, conductor Iris Lemare and composer Elisabeth Lutyens with the specific intention of providing a platform for new music by young composers. The programme that day also featured pieces by both Lutyens and Maconchy.

On the page, Holst’s Suite has something of its Baroque model about it: grand chords and fast-moving scales in the Prelude, the rollercoaster lines of the Gigue, and so on. But the soundworld she conjures is quite different, full of whole-tone scales, unusual leaps and occasional special effects. The Prelude vacillates between the strident and melancholic; the later Saraband is even more heartfelt and mournful. But the jolly second movement ‘Cinquepace’ is a musical pun: the term referred to the ‘five steps’ that would be taken in a sixteenth-century Italian dance such as a galliard; but whilst Holst

Our programme ends with two pieces by the Scottish composer Thea Musgrave, who like Bacewicz studied with Nadia Boulanger. Musgrave received the Queen’s Medal for Music in 2017, the year of her eighty-ninth birthday. Ventris particularly loved learning these two pieces. ‘Musgrave gets to the heart of things, even in a minute or two.’ Given the enormous social and political changes which have taken place during Musgrave’s lifetime, she has been quizzed on multiple occasions about the difficulties of attempting to establish a reputation as a female composer. ‘Yes,’ she observed in 2018 with customary wit, ‘I am a woman, and I am a composer. But rarely at the same time.’

Notes on the music

In the Still of the Night was composed in 1997, with Musgrave explaining that ‘It is intended as a moment of peaceful contemplation after the day’s activities cease.’ There is something distinctively Bachian about her treatment of the instrument here, bass notes ringing out at the opening of each phrase in the manner of a cello suite. Finally, we hear Light at the End of the Tunnel, written in August 2020 as part of BBC Radio 3’s ‘Postcards for Composers’ series, in the depths of the Coronavirus pandemic. Again, Musgrave provides us with her vision for this brief work: ‘the solo viola reacts to the journey through life during this terrifying worldwide 2020 pandemic with despair and agitation. His several

outbursts are interrupted by a quiet long-held E natural which of course represents the “light at the end of the tunnel”. Eventually the viola realizes that this light is indeed there and one day will be reachable. His agitation calms as he resolves this E natural to A major. The future is thus one of hope though there are many things that will have to be fought for.’

Katy Hamilton is a writer and presenter on music, specialising in nineteenth-century repertoire. She is much in demand as a speaker, appearing at concerts and festivals across the UK and on BBC Radio 3.

© 2023 Katy Hamilton

British violist Rosalind Ventris leads an international career as a soloist and chamber musician. As a recitalist, she has performed at the Royal Festival Hall, Wigmore Hall, Dublin International Chamber Music Festival, Purcell Room, Bozar and Flagey in Brussels, Slovak Philharmonic Bratislava, Aldeburgh Festival and Het Concertgebouw. As a concerto soloist, she has worked with the European Union Chamber Orchestra, Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra, Sinfonia Cymru, London Mozart Players, l’Orchestre Royal de Chambre de Wallonie and the Belgian National Orchestra. This is her debut solo album.

and Båstad festivals, IMS Prussia Cove Open Chamber Music, and venues such as the Auditorium du Louvre, Paris, and the Beethoven-Haus, Bonn.

University, and completed her postgraduate studies at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, where later she was a Fellow.

As a chamber musician, Rosalind frequently performs as part of the Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective, Associate Ensemble of the Wigmore Hall. Rosalind is also the violist of flute, viola and harp ensemble Trio Anima. She has collaborated with internationally renowned artists such as Mitsuko Uchida, Tabea Zimmermann, the Arcanto Quartett, the Endellion Quartet, the Marmen Quartet, Barry Douglas, John O’Conor, Gerhard Schultz and the Benedetti Elschenbroich Grynyuk Trio. She has been invited to perform at many prestigious festivals internationally, including the West Cork, Marlboro, Salzburg

Praised for her ‘beguiling’ and ‘characterful’ playing (Gramophone), Rosalind features as a chamber musician on recordings that have received highly favourable reviews in the national and international press. She has broadcast on BBC Radio 3, RTÉ Lyric FM, and NPO Radio 4. Rosalind also enjoys contemporary music collaborations, having performed alongside composers Garth Knox and Sally Beamish. As a former founder member of the Albion Quartet she recorded Richard Blackford’s Kalon with the Czech Philharmonic at the Rudolfinum (Prague). She has also premiered several works by Edwin Roxburgh, and in 2016 Rosalind recorded a new work for clarinet, viola and piano by Rory Boyle for Delphian Records with Fraser Langton and James Willshire (DCD34172). Rory Boyle has also written a work for Trio Anima, premiered in London in 2019.

Rosalind studied with David Takeno, Kim Kashkashian and Miguel da Silva, and participated in masterclasses with Tabea Zimmermann, Nobuko Imai, Menahem Pressler, Steven Isserlis, Hartmut Rohde, Steven Dann, Roberto Díaz, Ferenc Rados, Rita Wagner and Thomas Riebl. She holds an undergraduate degree from Cambridge

During her studies she received awards and prizes from the Hattori Foundation, Martin Musical Scholarship Fund, Help Musicians, Kirckman Concert Society, English Speaking Union, the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and the Countess of Munster Trust.

Rosalind was selected as an International Holland Music Sessions ‘Young Master on Tour’, a Countess of Munster Recital Scheme Artist, a Park Lane Group Artist, a Philip & Dorothy Green Making Music Award Winner (AYCA) and a City Music Foundation Artist. She was the youngest

prizewinner at the Lionel Tertis Competition in 2006, and won five prizes at the 2013 Tertis Competition, including the President’s Prize. From 2018 to 2019 Rosalind was an Edison Fellow at the British Library Sound Archive. Her publications include liner notes for Signum Records and articles for The Strad magazine.

Rosalind is a deeply committed teacher, and in 2021 was appointed Director of Musical Performance and Performance Studies at the University of Oxford. She is also a professor at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, and previously taught at the Royal Irish Academy of Music. She is Artistic Director of the Cowbridge Music Festival in Wales.

Rory Boyle: music for clarinet

DCD34172

Building on the legacy of Rory Boyle’s own youthful studies as a clarinettist and pianist, the works on this new portrait disc span a near forty-year compositional period, from the Sonatina (a gift to Boyle’s teacher Lennox Berkeley) to Dramatis Personae and Burble, written for the present performers. Fraser Langton’s communicative flair in this music – with its striking rhythmic energy and refreshing absence of sentimentality – is infectious, while pianist James Willshire already has an acclaimed solo album of Boyle’s piano music to his credit. Together, and joined by Rosalind Ventris on viola in the concluding trio, they bring to life the composer’s inventiveness, humour, and unfailing sense of melodic line.

‘the sheer versatility of Boyle’s creativity is impressive, as are all the performances’ — The Scotsman, May 2017

Phrases

Héloïse Werner soprano; Colin Alexander cello, Amy Harman bassoon, Calum Huggan percussion, Lawrence Power violin, viola, Daniel Shao flute, Laura Snowden guitar DCD34269

Luminous and daring, this celebration of Héloïse Werner’s multifaceted gifts is nourished by rich dualities. Phrases reveals Werner as both singer and composer, as an artist shaped by both her native France and her adopted UK, and as a soloist of captivating individuality who is also an intrepid collaborator. The solos and duos that make up the album comprise five of Werner’s own compositions, four of Georges Aperghis’s avant-garde classic Récitations, and six newly commissioned works, by composers ranging from Cheryl FrancesHoad and Nico Muhly to Oliver Leith. The calibre of Héloïse’s instrumental partners in the duos reflects the degree to which this extraordinary young performer is already valued and cherished by her peers.

‘a soprano of extraordinary range, tone and vocal abilities’ — Gramophone, June 2022, EDITOR'S CHOICE

The feeling of life gone into standstill which so many of us experienced in spring 2020 was especially acute for

and

Craddock, deprived not only of live concert opportunities but forced to put their April marriage plans on hold. Seeking ways to redirect her creative energies, Helen wrote a poem for Michael to mark their postponed wedding date, and the composer Owain Park, a friend of the couple, set it to music. Helen began to contact other composers and poets, and unexpectedly but quickly a recording project took shape that would both fill the empty time and bear witness to it, with music proving its ability to build connections across physical distance.

‘A recital that’s hard to resist, at once fresh and profoundly familiar’ — Gramophone, March 2021

DCD34233

Three years as a Delphian artist have seen Sean Shibe record music from seventeenth-century Scottish lute manuscripts to twenty-first-century works for electric guitar, picking up multiple editor’s choices and award nominations for each release, as well as the Royal Philharmonic Society’s prestigious Young Artist of the Year accolade. Now he turns to the music of J. S. Bach, with three works whose obscure early performance history belies their status as repertoire staples for modern guitarists. The musicological questions that have arisen over what instrument Bach intended for these works – questions encapsulated for Shibe by the phrase ‘pour la luth ò cembal’, which appears in the composer’s hand at the head of the manuscript of the Prelude to BWV 998 – are here answered by the unshakeable assurance of Shibe’s performances.

‘masterful, beautiful and convincing in every way’

— The Times, May 2020, *****

Fraser Langton, James Willshire, Rosalind Ventris

Isolation Songbook Helen Charlston, Michael Craddock, Alexander Soares DCD34253

singers Helen Charlston

Michael

PRESTO Editor’s choice

PRESTO Editor’s choice

Bach: Lute Suites BWV 996–998 Sean Shibe guitar

PRESTO 2020 Recording of the Year Winner

The Piano Tuner: contemporary piano trios from Scotland

Fidelio Trio, Alexander McCall Smith

DCD34084

Storytelling takes centre stage in the Fidelio Trio’s second recording for Delphian, in which they are joined by Alexander McCall Smith, who narrates Sally Beamish’s evocative The Seafarer Trio with a mingled intimacy and plangency. The comparatively abstract sounds of Nigel Osborne’s The Piano Tuner track a journey into the dark heart of nineteenthcentury Burma, while the stories told in Judith Weir’s Zen-inspired Piano Trio Two include that of ‘How grass and trees become enlightened’.

‘as bracing as a splash of water from a Highland stream … This kind of music is food and drink to the Fidelio Trio and it gives sure-footed, rhythmically alive, directly communicative performances of all three works’ — International Record Review, December 2010

Calen-o: Songs from the North of Ireland

Carolyn Dobbin, Iain Burnside

DCD34187

A passionate advocate for the art music of her native Northern Ireland, mezzosoprano Carolyn Dobbin has put together this programme that attests to a rich yet little-known tradition. Who knew that doyen of Anglican church music Charles Wood was in fact an Ulsterman, and a fine composer of art song? Premiere recordings of Wood and of the forward-looking Hamilton Harty are interleaved with songs by Joan Trimble and Howard Ferguson in a journey of delightful discovery.

‘With her rich palette of tone and colour, Dobbin knows how to communicate text and music, while Iain Burnside’s accompaniments are beautifully managed. Both voice and piano are finely captured and well balanced’

— BBC Music Magazine, May 2018

Battle Cry: She Speaks

I And Silence: Women’s Voices in American Song

Lieberson – Argento – Barber – Copland – Crumb

Marta Fontanals-Simmons, Lana Bode

DCD34229

This powerful yet understated recital of seventeenth-century and modern works aims to revisit but also to re-balance the obsession of earlier music with female abandonment and lament. The stories of women such as Dido and Ariadne have been told and retold throughout history. Mezzosoprano Helen Charlston reconsiders the assumed helplessness of those often seen as being left behind by male adventure and success. A recent work commissioned for Charlston from the composer Owain Park further takes up the challenge of giving ‘abandoned women’ their own platform, as well as exploring new possibilities for an instrumental pairing – that of voice and theorbo – that remains little explored in contemporary music.

‘surely one of the most exciting voices in the new generation of British singers’ — Gramophone, June 2022, EDITOR’S CHOICE

‘Did I sing too loud?’ asked Emily Dickinson in 1861, in a poem set a century later by Aaron Copland. The expectations of silence often placed on women, historically and politically, and music’s power to break through them, are the themes of this deeply personal recital. Mezzo-soprano Marta FontanalsSimmons and pianist Lana Bode channel the voices of female writers and musicians: Dickinson herself, Sara Teasdale and Virginia Woolf are among those whose words are set in the works brought together here, two of which – Dominick Argento’s From the Diary of Virginia Woolf and Peter Lieberson’s Rilke Songs – were written for great mezzo-sopranos of the recent past, Dame Janet Baker and Lorraine Hunt Lieberson.

‘Fontanals-Simmons prioritises solidity of vocal production and excellent diction over flashy point-making and expressive distortions. She prefers the words and music to do the talking, and they do so eloquently’

— BBC Music Magazine, October 2019

Helen Charlston mezzo-soprano, Toby Carr theorbo DCD34283