JAVS Fall 2020

Music Reviews

Irish Melodies By Gregory K. Williams

of “Molly on the Shore” for solo violin and piano, an arrangement with which Grainger was not thrilled. Itzhak Perlman and Rachel Barton Pine’s recordings of Kreisler’s arrangement show the melodic line at the beginning of the arrangement is stinted by the violin’s lack of a C string, preventing the violin from reaching the low Ds in the opening of the piece. The fast tempos (with a Presto marked at 120 per half note) in Kreisler’s arrangement cause a loss of clarity on shorter articulations. Lionel Tertis took a turn at transcribing and recording “Molly on the Shore” for viola and piano in 1923, with Frank St. Leger as his pianist. Unlike in the violin arrangement, the viola arrangement successfully maintains many of the original voicings from the string orchestra version. Tertis creates embellishments that are not in the violin or string orchestra arrangements. Richard Masters’s 2019 edition published by Bardic Edition Music Publishers is based on Tertis’s 1923 recording. Masters captures several of Tertis’s performance details, even going so far as to add articulation suggestions, such as “rough” at measure 75 in a passage of sliding doublestops that are not designed to be graceful. Masters also successfully incorporates an ascending glissando from Tertis’s performance practice at measure 137. Although this rendition captures many playful moments from the original string orchestra version, the viola and piano instrumentation contains nearly uninterrupted passagework—allowing for few places between phrases in which to breathe. Perhaps the point of a reel is to keep the dance moving, almost breathlessly, and let the melodic line meander from one phrase to the next. This piece would serve as an excellent encore piece on a recital for any advanced-level violist.

Molly on the Shore: Irish Reel, by Percy Aldridge Grainger Transcribed by Lionel Tertis, notated from the recording and edited by Richard Masters. Bardic Edition, BDE 1212 Molly on the Shore: Irish Reel, adapted for viola by the Australian-born Percy Aldridge Grainger (1882–1961), is better-known by its string orchestra version. Molly on the Shore is based on two reels from Cork, Ireland, “Molly on the Shore” and “Temple Hill,” both found in a collection of Irish Folk Tunes compiled by Charles Villiers Stanford. The piece was originally set in 1907 as a birthday gift for Grainger’s mother, with a dedication to the recently deceased Edvard Grieg. Grainger later arranged it for wind band in 1920. Fritz Kreisler created an arrangement

Journal of the American Viola Society / Vol. 36, No. 2, Fall 2020

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