CANTABILE ANTHEMS FOR VIOLA Jordan Bak
Richard Uttley
CANTABILE: ANTHEMS FOR VIOLA
Jordan Bak viola
Richard Uttley piano (tracks 2, 4–18)
1 Jonathan Harvey (1939–2012) Chant [3:33]
2 Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958) Romance [6:39]
3 Bright Sheng (b. 1955) The Stream Flows [5:16]
Arnold Bax (1883–1953) Sonata for Viola and Piano, GP 251
4 I. Molto moderato [10:52]
5 II. Allegro energico ma non troppo presto [7:14]
6 III. Molto lento [8:55]
7 Augusta Read Thomas (b. 1964) Song without Words* [9:20]
Benjamin Britten (1913–1976) Lachrymae: Reflections on a song of Dowland, Op. 48
8 Lento [1:51]
9 Allegretto, andante molto [1:01]
[1:34]
Total playing time [67:21]
* premiere recording
Young Classical Artists Trust (YCAT) has been at the forefront of international artist development since 1984 – nurturing and launching some of the most significant careers on the world stage, including Ian Bostridge, Alison Balsom, the Belcea Quartet, and Delphian artists Sean Shibe and Philip Higham.
Released in August 2020 and already the subject of great acclaim both in the UK press and internationally, recorder player Tabea Debus’s recital album Ohrwurm inaugurated a partnership between Delphian Records and YCAT which the two organisations have specially tailored to offer precious recording opportunities for the most promising young artists. The collaboration unites YCAT’s mission of developing careers at a worldclass level with Delphian’s twenty-year reputation for bold, considered programming. From initial concept planning, through recording and editing to the final packaged and digital product, the scheme reflects and enhances both Delphian’s and YCAT’s commitments to nurturing their musicians’ artistic development and long-term careers.
Recorded on 10-12 July 2023 at Greyfriars Kirk, Edinburgh
Producer/Engineer: Paul Baxter
24-bit digital editing: Jack Davis
24-bit digital mixing & mastering: Paul Baxter
Piano: Steinway model D, serial no 600443 (2016)
Piano technician: Al Edmondson
Following on from Tabea Debus, LSO principal oboe Olivier Stankiewicz, longstanding violin/piano duo Benjamin Baker and Daniel Lebhardt, and accordionist Samuele Telari joined the Delphian family with releases in spring and summer 2021. The Castalian String Quartet joined the series in spring 2022, and the cellist Maciej Kułakowski at the end of that year. The present release is the first of three more YCAT artist portraits to be released across 2024. The complete collection will offer audiences around the world an engaging and varied series of albums, covering repertoire from the fourteenth century to the present day.
Delphian and YCAT are indebted to the generosity of Alastair and Liz Storey that supports this partnership.
www.ycat.co.uk
Cover & session photography: foxbrushfilms.com
Design: John Christ
Booklet editor: John Fallas
Delphian Records Ltd – Edinburgh – UK
www.delphianrecords.com
The nineteenth-century cult of the violin virtuoso cast its long shadow over the young Lionel Tertis. Obliged – as his entry in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians recalls – ‘to overcome much prejudice before the public accepted the viola as a solo instrument’, he did so from a position of relative strength, from 1897 as a member and later principal viola in Henry Wood’s Queen’s Hall Orchestra and from 1900 as professor of viola at the Royal Academy of Music in London. Tertis did for his instrument what Pablo Casals, with whom he shared a birthday and the virtue of single-minded determination, did for the cello, not least by elevating its status as a solo instrument and inspiring composers to write substantial concert pieces for it.
1895 to study violin at the Royal Academy of Music; encouraged by the institution’s principal, Alexander Mackenzie, he took up viola and, propelled by the practical experience of playing with a string quartet, effectively taught himself to play the instrument, ‘for the simple reason that there were no pedagogues for the viola’.
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Tertis, born in 1876 and raised the son of a synagogue reader among the Jewish community of Spitalfields, remembered childhood years spent in ‘a place of such intensity and squalor that I wonder I have lived to tell the tale’. Music proved to be his shield against the harsh realities of the East End’s slums. The boy learned piano as an infant, gave his first concert at the age of six and was an accomplished player by the time he left home seven years later to scrape a living as pianist. Young Lionel saved sufficient money to enrol at Trinity College of Music, where he studied piano and violin. Following six months at the Leipzig Conservatory, he returned home in
Tertis’s technical control and beautiful tone inspired York Bowen and Benjamin Dale to write works for him. Others soon followed. During his early years at the Academy, Tertis became friendly with Arnold Bax, one of Frederick Corder’s composition students, who had fallen under the spell of Ireland, its landscape, its legends and its literary renaissance, the so-called Celtic Twilight fuelled by the works of W.B. Yeats, J.M. Synge and the circle of writers associated with Dublin’s Abbey Theatre. Bax wrote his first work for Tertis in 1904, a single-movement piece praised by the critic of the Musical Standard for breathing ‘a spirit almost of rebellion and riot through its fervid pages’. It seems likely that the two men met occasionally after the young composer’s marriage and move to Dublin before the First World War, and probable that they were reunited in London in 1918 after Bax left his wife and two children for the pianist Harriet Cohen.
In 1920 Bax wrote for Tertis a lyrical concerto, overtly Celtic in its melodic language, which he subsequently entitled Phantasy. Late the
following year, having absorbed lessons learned from studying William Byrd’s Mass for Five Voices and applied them in his carol for double choir, Mater ora filium, he began composing a Sonata for Viola and Piano, which he completed in January 1922. Tertis gave the work’s first performance at the Aeolian Hall in November 1922 with Bax at the piano. Its three movements – a turbulent central scherzo flanked by lugubrious companions – speak of Bax’s gift for melodic invention and ability to bring order to his often discursive, occasionally unruly themes with the support of clear formal structures.
The sonata opens with soft, chiming piano chords, which provide the syncopated accompaniment to the viola’s main theme, a freshly minted folksong-without-words evocative of Irish balladry. The tune, with its yearning initial phrase and carefully judged rise and fall, supplies rich raw material for subsequent development across a sequence of contrasting episodes, the first of which captures the composer’s enduring fondness for the energy and exuberance of youth. The partnership between viola and piano unfolds as an engaging dialogue of equals, with each stepping out with versions of the movement’s ‘Irish’ theme. Bax shifts with ease between diatonic and chromatic harmonies – the latter ‘diamond-clean’, to borrow a description coined by the young
conductor and composer Christopher Whelan in a BBC tribute broadcast soon after Bax’s death. In writing for viola, Bax took full account of Tertis’s famously warm tone across the instrument’s range; the resulting contrasts of texture and timbre prove a godsend in the variety they bring to a movement so heavily dependent on a single theme.
The rhapsodic nature of the Molto moderato is dispelled by the piano trills and left-hand ostinato of the sonata’s central movement, a demonic dance of a kind Stravinsky might have concocted had he spent the war years in Galway rather than a small town near Lausanne. Bax relaxes the tension at the movement’s midway point with another of his Celtic tunes, a playful affair introduced by the viola and followed soon after by a more reflective melody, as if both belonged to the same bar-room medley. The main theme surfaces again in a haunting coda that moves steadily towards a moto perpetuo flourish; any sense of an ending, however, is abruptly overturned by the Molto lento, with its lowering opening chords and lachrymose viola theme, momentarily repetitive yet gloriously free in its restless spirit. There’s something of Yeats about this closing movement – distilled by Bax, a self-confessed ‘abject worshipper’ of the Irishman’s poetry, into complex chromatic harmonies and the wistful romanticism of his themes.
William Primrose, like Lionel Tertis, began life in humble circumstances. Born in Glasgow in 1904, he received his first violin lessons at the age of four from his father, a member of what was then known as the Scottish Orchestra, and was soon sent to study the instrument with Camillo Ritter, one of Joseph Joachim’s pupils. Young Willie’s teacher, who persuaded him to give up boxing to protect his hands, sent the teenager to audition for Landon Ronald, a regular guest conductor with the Scottish Orchestra. Ronald’s recommendation secured a scholarship for Primrose to study at the Guildhall School of Music in London. Although he gave his solo debut at Queen’s Hall in 1923 and made professional inroads as a violinist, Primrose felt that his playing had reached a plateau. He sought advice from the revered Belgian violinist Eugène Ysaÿe, who agreed to teach him; during the course of their lessons, Primrose confessed that he was considering switching to viola, a notion encouraged by Ysaÿe. The move was denounced by Primrose’s father, who had already taken against his son for marrying an Englishwoman, and they became estranged for many years; meanwhile, William succeeded Lionel Tertis as champion of his instrument, at first as soloist and chamber musician, then as a member of Arturo Toscanini’s NBC Symphony Orchestra.
When in 1941 Primrose heard the baseless rumour that Toscanini was about to resign,
he quit the NBC Orchestra and revived his solo career as a support act on wartime tours of the United States with the tenor Richard Crooks, a star of the Metropolitan Opera. By the end of the war, Bill Primrose had himself become a star, promoted as the world’s greatest violist and active in commissioning new works, Béla Bartók’s Viola Concerto notable among them. The seeds of Lachrymae were sown when Britten, introduced to Primrose by the publisher, Ralph Hawkes, invited him to be part of the third Aldeburgh Festival in June 1950. Britten’s pitch to Primrose was sealed with the promise of a new piece for viola and piano which they would perform together; unfortunately, Britten forgot to write it until prompted by a phone call from Primrose a month before the scheduled premiere. Having assured him that it was ‘in the post’, Britten worked through the night to compose Lachrymae, which he subtitled ‘Reflections on a song of John Dowland’.
In a note to the work’s first edition, Britten described his piece as ‘a series of variations on the first phrase of Dowland’s song
“If my complaints could passions move”, one of his most characteristically passionate melodies’. Lachrymae begins with a foreboding introduction in which Dowland’s theme, written around 1590 as a galliard in memory of the pirate Captain Diggory Piper, is stated in the piano’s bass line. ‘John Dowland put at the top of one of his pieces “Semper Dowland, semper
Little is known about the origins of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Romance for viola and piano. Its manuscript was discovered in the composer’s library after his death in 1958, and the piece was put into print by Oxford University Press three years later. It was first performed at the headquarters of the Arts Council in 1962 by Bernard Shore, a former Tertis pupil, who had been wounded during the First World War and lost two fingers from his right hand. It seems likely that it was written for Shore’s teacher, perhaps as early as 1914; Vaughan Williams certainly admired Tertis and wrote two major works for him, Flos Campi in 1925 and the Suite for viola and small orchestra in the early 1930s. The Romance opens with a series of lilting piano chords Notes
based on a pentatonic scale, above which the viola unfurls an imagined folk melody that becomes more impassioned, more urgent as it climbs towards a double-stopped elaboration of the tune and a heart-melting passage of descending octaves. The work earns its title in the turbulent central section, a triple-time outpouring of what could be unbridled grief or yearning for a lost way of life. Order is restored with the return of a modified version of the work’s melancholy opening and a final, muted statement of the viola’s folksong.
Jonathan Harvey’s formative experiences of ritual worship, gained as a choirboy at St Michael’s College, Tenbury, and of playing cello with the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain and the BBC Scottish Orchestra, belong to the strands of spiritual and practical influence at work in Chant. The short piece, conceived in 1992 and dedicated to the composer’s former pupil Andrew Toovey (himself a viola player as well as composer), rises from a single pedal note, similar in function to the tenor cantus firmus of a medieval organum, which is heard throughout the composition and supports a more complex second ‘voice’. The latter’s intense incantation contrasts mantra-like figures with double-stopped high harmonics, a pattern interrupted by a brief, strictly measured passage and soon replaced by rippling arpeggios comprising whispery harmonics bowed close to the dolens” [“Always Dowland, always sad”],’ observed Britten, ‘and this piece darkly reflects that introspective melancholy that was so much part of the Elizabethan temperament.’ While essentially ruminative in nature, especially so in its haunting ‘Tranquillo’ section, Lachrymae contains episodes of extrovert display, present in the austere counterpoint of the ‘Allegro con moto’, the declamatory viola chords of the ‘Largamente’ and again in the echoes of Dowland’s song ‘Flow my tears’ that surface in the brief ‘Appassionato’. The work closes with a summative reflection in which, after a vigorous introduction, Dowland’s tune is stated for the first time with its original harmonies.
instrument’s bridge. Like a celebrant marking the close of a sacred service, Harvey crowns Chant with a final rhythmic flourish and a fading tremolo figure played at first near the bridge, then with the bow in its natural position between bridge and fingerboard.
The Chinese–American composer Bright
Sheng was born in Shanghai and exiled under Chaiman Mao’s Cultural Revolution to the remote Qinghai province, formerly part of Tibet. His love for Chinese folksong in all its diverse forms and expressive variety, a legacy of his time in Qinghai, infuses the melodic material and structure of The Stream Flows. The piece, notes Sheng, is based on a folksong from southern China. ‘The freshness, and richness of the tune deeply touched me when I first heard it. Since then, I have used it as basic material in several of my works. In this setting, the sound of the viola should evoke the timbre, and tone quality of a female folk singer.’
Sheng’s piece captures the wistful spirit of a woman who compares her lover, absent in the mountains, to bright moonlight. Like the moon, she feels his presence in the sky, like a stream of pure water running from mountainside to valley. ‘A clear breeze blows up the hill,’ she sings. ‘My love, do you hear I am calling you?’
Sheng states the original song in full before departing from it with a sequence of angular intervals – bare fourths, fifths and octaves –
and an impassioned rush of double-stopped octaves and sevenths pitched high in the viola’s upper register. The central section’s anxious feel appears to echo the lover’s concerns: is her man safe? has he been faithful? will he return?
Whatever fears she holds are eased as Sheng recalls a fragment of her song, expressed in rich tones, and banished as the viola’s voice ascends on a wave of ethereal natural harmonics.
While Lionel Tertis and William Primrose helped forge the viola’s modern solo repertoire, Jordan Bak belongs to the latest generation of players to have enriched the canon with fresh commissions and works created for them. Augusta Read Thomas’s Song without Words, originally written in 2018, exists in versions for a striking diversity of instrumental companions – among them oboe and piano, alto flute and piano, bass trombone and piano, and viola and piano. The latter, created for Jordan Bak and Richard Uttley, is rich in tonal and textural nuances, which grow from the near-symbiotic, yin-yang partnership between the viola’s lyrical line and the keyboard’s limpid interjections. The work’s gestures and myriad expressive details are directly informed by the poem ‘i have found what you are like’ by E. E. Cummings, with Read Thomas’s music responding to and projecting its deep layers of meaning without uttering a word.
©
2024 Andrew Stewart
Award-winning Jamaican–American violist
Jordan Bak has achieved international acclaim as a trailblazing artist, praised for his radiant stage presence, dynamic interpretations and fearless power. Critics have described him as ‘an exciting new voice in classical performance’ (I Care If You Listen ), ‘a powerhouse musician, with a strong voice and compelling sound’ (The Whole Note ) and lauded his ‘haunting lyrical grace’ (Gramophone ). The 2021 YCAT Robey Artist and a top laureate of the 2020 Sphinx Competition, Bak is also a Grand Prize winner and Audience Prize recipient of the 2019 Concert Artists Guild Victor Elmaleh Competition, and the recipient of the 2019 Samuel Sanders Tel Aviv Museum Prize and of the 2019 John White Special Prize from the Tertis International Viola Competition. Recently named one of Classic FM’s ‘30 Under 30’ Rising Stars, he has also been Musical America’s New Artist of the Month and a featured artist for WQXR’s inaugural Artist Propulsion Lab.
Bak’s enthusiastically received debut album
IMPULSE (Bright Shiny Things ) was released in May 2022, garnering over one million streams on major digital media platforms; it features new compositions by Tyson Gholston Davis, Toshio Hosokawa, Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti, Quinn Mason, Jeffrey Mumford and Joan Tower. A proud new music advocate, Bak has given world premieres of Kaija Saariaho’s Du gick, flög for viola and mezzo-soprano, Augusta Read Thomas’s Upon Wings of Words for string quartet and soprano, and two works by Jessica Meyer – Excessive Use of Force for solo viola and On fire … no, after you for viola, mezzo-soprano and piano. He has additionally championed works by H. Leslie Adams, Esteban Zapata Blanco, Carlos Carillo, Caroline Shaw and Alvin Singleton.
Bak has appeared as soloist with orchestras including the London Philharmonic Orchestra, Sarasota Orchestra, London Mozart Players, New York Classical Players, Juilliard Orchestra and Brandon Hill Chamber Orchestra, and has performed under such esteemed conductors as Howard Griffiths, Stephen Mulligan, Keith Lockhart, Gerard Schwarz and Ewa Strusińska. As a recitalist and chamber
musician, he has been heard at some of the world’s greatest performance venues including Carnegie Hall, the Concertgebouw, Wigmore Hall, Jordan Hall, Merkin Concert Hall, Princeton University Concerts, Perelman Theater at The Kimmel Center, Elgar Concert Hall and Helsinki Musiikkitalo.
Bak has been a presence at numerous chamber music festivals – Marlboro Music Festival, Tippet Rise, Chamber Music Northwest, Roman River Festival and Newport Classical, among others – and has appeared during the year at Chamber Music Detroit, Chamber Music Society of Central Virginia, and Chamber Music Society of Little Rock.
Recent and upcoming highlights include NEXUS Chamber Music, Brooklyn Chamber Music Society, and Emory University, as well as chamber music tours with Musicians from Marlboro. Bak has performed as a guest with the Verona Quartet and Merz Trio and has collaborated with artists such as Jonathan Biss, Lara Downes, Jennifer Frautschi, Ani Kavafian, Soovin Kim, Charles Neidich, Marina Piccinini and Gilles Vonsattel.
Passionate about education, Bak currently serves as Assistant Professor of Viola at University of North Carolina School of the Arts (UNCSA). He is a former faculty member of Bowling Green State University in Ohio and has served as a visiting artist and Ambassador for Music Masters in London. Additionally, he has given masterclasses at the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, Conservatorio del Tolima (Colombia) and the Brevard Music Center.
Only the third violist to earn the Artist Diploma from The Juilliard School, Jordan Bak holds a Bachelor of Music degree from New England Conservatory and a Master of Music degree from The Juilliard School, where he was awarded the prestigious Kovner Fellowship. His principal teachers were Dimitri Murrath, Hsin-Yun Huang and Samuel Rhodes.
Noted for the integrity of his musicianship as soloist, chamber musician and recording artist in a wide range of repertoire, Richard Uttley has been praised for his ‘musical intelligence and pristine facility’ (International Record Review ), ‘amazing decisiveness’ and ‘tumultuous performance’ (Daily Telegraph ). His playing has frequently been broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and he has featured on BBC Two, BBC Four, the BBC World Service, Classic FM and Sky Arts. He took first prize in the British Contemporary Piano Competition in 2006 and was a prizewinner at the Young Classical Artists Trust International Auditions in 2011. He studied at the University of Cambridge, graduating from Clare College with a Double First in Music, and at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama with Martin Roscoe.
Richard has released several solo recordings to critical acclaim, and has appeared at venues and festivals including the Auditorium du Louvre (Paris), Banff Centre (Alberta), Bath Festival, Bridgewater Hall (Manchester), BOZAR (Brussels), Cadogan Hall, Kings Place, the Royal Festival Hall, Queen Elizabeth Hall and Wigmore Hall (London), the Concertgebouw (Amsterdam), Elbphilharmonie (Hamburg), Festspiele Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Fundación Juan March (Madrid), Gulbenkian Foundation (Lisbon), Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Klangspuren Festival (Innsbruck),
Konzerthaus Berlin, Modulus Festival (Vancouver), Musikverein (Vienna), National Centre for Performing Arts (Mumbai) and the Schleswig-Holstein Festival. He has also toured in China and Colombia. Highlights this season include Lucerne Festival with Ben Goldscheider, Wigmore Hall and a tour of Sweden with their horn trio.
Richard’s long-term chamber music collaborators include composer and clarinettist Mark Simpson, violinists Savitri Grier and Callum Smart, and horn player Ben Goldscheider. At the International Musicians Seminar, Prussia Cove, Richard has participated in both masterclasses (studying with Thomas Adès) and the renowned Open Chamber Music seminar. In 2019, working with composer Kate Whitley, Richard won the Yvar Mikhashoff pianist/composer commissioning prize. Other composers with whom Richard has collaborated closely include Julian Anderson, Francisco Coll, Michael Cutting, Chaya Czernowin, Erika Fox, Georg Friedrich Haas, Rolf Hind, Robin Holloway, Matthew Kaner and Naomi Pinnock.
Richard is a Professor of Piano at the Royal College of Music and a Professor of Academic Studies at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama. He also teaches at the RCM Junior Department. In 2021 he became a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
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‘To hear this music, so full of poetry, joy and sorrow, realised to such perfection, felt like a miracle’
— The Observer, January 2020
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Repression and censorship; optimism and freedom; renewed constraints. If this sounds like a now all too familiar story of political progress achieved and then reversed, Michael Foyle and Maksim Štšura’s compelling survey of chamber works by two of Poland’s leading postwar composers attests that music was there to bear witness to each twist and turn of the tale. Journeying from the post-Stalin thaw of the 1950s and 1960s, through the triumphant re-establishment of democracy and on to the century’s ambivalent end, we encounter the exploded intensities of Penderecki’s Three Miniatures, the lean, focused expressive charge of Lutoslawski’s Partita and the millennial anxieties of Penderecki’s Violin Sonata No 2.
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