JAVS Fall 2008

R ECORDING R EVIEWS

by Carlos María Solare

if barlines didn’t exist. Chase’s tempo is a shade hasty, but he holds the long movement together in an exemplary way and, in the suite’s outer movements, meets the music’s outrageous technical demands head on. Unfortunately, Chase has overlooked an obvious misprint: eight bars from the end, the first five notes of the run should be read in the alto clef, and two bars later the second note should be an E, as in the parallel passages. Otaki is a tower of strength, coping gallantly with the orchestrally conceived piano part. Dale’s one-movement, twenty minute Phantasy, op. 4 (1910) is written in the same vein. A delightful and rare encore is Dale’s English Dance , written originally for the violin and heard here in an arrangement for viola by the com poser’s fellow student, York Bowen, himself a violist and the creator of much marvelous music for the instrument. Introduction and Andante , op. 5 for six violas was written in 1911 for Tertis and his class. Some post-Wagnerian harmonies therein strongly recall Arnold Schoenberg’s recently pub lished Verklärte Nacht. The sixth viola is required to tune the fourth string to B-flat, and to go even further down near the end in order to contribute a low A-flat to the final chord. Keeping in the spirit of the piece’s premiere, Chase leads five of his former stu dents in a radiant, beautifully bal anced performance. Yet another

violist, Michael Ponder, is credited as the producer of this lovingly presented recording.

Benjamin J. Dale: Music for Viola – Suite, op. 2; Phantasy, op. 4; Introduction and Andante , op. 5; English Dance . Roger Chase, viola; Michiko Otaki, piano. Dutton CDLX 7204. As pedigrees go, this recording has an unimpeachable one: Roger Chase was a student of Bernard Shore, himself a disciple of Lionel Tertis, for whom all the composi tions included here were written in the early years of the twentieth century. As if this were not enough, Chase plays the Montagnana viola previously owned by both Shore and Tertis. Benjamin Dale wrote, according to his teacher at the Royal Academy of Music (RAM), “fewer and better works than any English composer of his generation.” During his years at the RAM, Dale was persuaded by Tertis, the institution’s viola teacher, to write for the instrument (as were also Arnold Bax and York Bowen among others), and the results are included in this CD. Chase has a complete understanding of the music’s unashamed Romanticism. He uses fingerings in the style of Tertis’s extremely personal ones and is not afraid of portamento. The Romance from Dale’s Suite, op. 2 (1906/07) was once record ed by Tertis himself. The “endless melody” of its first subject flows undisturbed for forty-plus bars, as

D’Amore. Music by Knox, Marais, Moser, Hume, Ariosti, and Huber. Garth Knox, viola d’amore; Agnès Vestermann, vio loncello. ECM New Series 1925 476 6369. In this recording, Garth Knox presents a panorama of music for the viola d’amore ranging from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries, and even further back in time if we count the medieval song Malor me bat , attributed to Johannes Ockeghem, which is the basis of Knox’s own composition of the same title. The piece opens with a virtuoso cadenza for the viola d’amore, and portions of the song keep appearing in a dream like manner. JAVS readers will like to know of an alternative ver sion of Malor me bat , in which the viola d’amore is accompanied by five scordatura violas, the open strings of which add to the reso nance of the viola d’amore’s sym pathetic strings. Knox performed this version at the 2005 International Viola Congress in Reykjavík to mesmerizing effect. Both Tobias Hume’s unaccompa nied piece, A Pavin (1605) and Marin Marais’s Les Folies d’Espagne (with cello accompaniment) are originally for the viola da gamba.

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