JAVS Fall 2012

bona fide first movement! Although a sonata form could be analyzed out of the opening Andante, sem pre largamente, quasi un poco adagio (to give it its full title), I can’t say I perceived it with the naked ear, the various motives complementing rather than contrasting each other. Never mind, nothing beats a good tune, and this Walker delivers in spades. He wrote this sonata for the London violist Alfred Hobday in 1897, and Lionel Tertis edited it for publication. Spencer Martin seems to take a page or two from Tertis’s book regarding phrasing and fingerings (in spirit if not in letter), as he most appropriately does in the Romance by Benjamin Dale, a staple of Tertis’s repertoire. I was slightly disappointed that Martin didn’t include the two outer movements from Dale’s Suite as well, but then the Romance stands well alone, and Tertis him self used to play it on its own. Martin spins the movement’s “endless melody” beautifully before going on to the playful rubato middle section.

If asked what is meant by a “Russian Brahms”—a description often applied to Paul Juon—one could do worse than play Juon’s Viola Sonata by way of an explanation. Melodic material of Slavonic hue— like the sonata’s very opening—is developed with typical German thoroughness, with Brahmsian fin gerprints like three-against-two rhythmic patterns never far away. Robert Fuchs also composed in Brahms’s wake, but rather than writing sweeping tunes, he relished smaller formats, painstakingly exhausting a motif ’s potential before going on to the next. Heard after the other three pieces on this CD, Fuchs’s Viola Sonata can sound four-square in comparison, as probably wouldn’t be the case in another context. There’s certainly nothing four square in the playing of Spencer Martin and Miko Kominami, a well-attuned team who react vividly to each other. Martin’s quiet musicianship presents these pieces, which could easily be all over the place, in a clear-headed, intensely satisfying way,

Geoffrey Ovington

J OURNAL OF THE AMERICAN VIOLA SOCIETy 72