JAVS Spring 2014

Oistrakhs’ duo playing; rather a conscious contrasting of colors and characters. Julius Harrison: Sonata in C Minor; Arthur Bliss: Sonata for Viola and Piano; Arthur Benjamin: Sonata for Viola and Piano. Patricia McCarty, viola; Eric Larsen, piano. Ashmont Music 1113. Three weighty sonatas by as many British composers are included in Patricia McCarty’s latest CD. That by Arthur Bliss, written in 1933 for Lionel Tertis, is deservedly gaining a toe-hold in the repertoire, and several excellent recordings have been issued in the past few years. McCarty’s is up there with the best. She and Eric Larsen characterize the music with a sweeping gesture and are well on top of its virtuoso demands. Although technically really difficult, the viola part is idiomatically written (Bliss wrote later that Tertis’s name should by rights appear on the score as “joint composer”), and McCarty seems to observe Tertis’s fingerings and other markings, cer tainly in spirit if not necessarily in letter, adding to the overall impact of her interpretation. Australian-born Arthur Benjamin wrote his Viola Sonata—alternatively known, after the titles of its movements, as Elegy, Waltz and Toccata —in 1942, while he stayed in Canada during the war, and dedi cated it to William Primrose (there is also a later ver sion with orchestra). The writing is, accordingly, bril liantly virtuosic, and Benjamin achieves an uncom mon feeling of unity by transforming his main motifs for use in all the movements. Julius Harrison was an important conductor who worked with the likes of Arthur Nikisch and Sir Thomas Beecham. As a young man he studied composition with Granville Bantock in Birmingham, and he won an important prize at the age of twenty-three, but it was only when increasing hearing problems forced him to give up the baton in the 1940s that he devoted himself completely to composition. His Viola Sonata was written in 1945 for Jean Stewart (for whom Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote his viola-centric Second String Quartet at about the same time). The somber music surely reflects the troubled times in which it was conceived, but the first movement does bring forth a noble Elgarian melody, and the Andante e cantabile sempre has the viola chirping peacefully in an atmosphere redolent of Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending . McCarty’s nut-brown tone is won derfully suited to this mostly melancholic music, and

in close partnership with Eric Larsen she has pro duced benchmark readings of three important works from the mid-twentieth century. Colori e Suoni del Novecento : 20th Century Music for Solo Viola . Stravinsky: Élégie ; Britten: Elegy ; Hovhaness: Chahagir ; Reger: Suite No. 1; Penderecki: Cadenza , Sarabanda ; Hindemith: Sonata, op. 25, no. 1. Laura Menegozzo, viola. SSP 2013. Colors and Sounds of the 20th Century is the title of this debut CD by the Neapolitan violist Laura Menegozzo, and color is very much to the fore in a recording that features some very beautiful playing and has a second protagonist in Menegozzo’s instru ment, a viola made in 1699 by Carlo Giuseppe Testore. There are some positively inebriating sounds to be heard here, covering the whole dynamic spec trum between veiled softness and a strong, but never shrieking, fortissimo . The disc’s absolute highlight for me is Alan Hovhaness’s prayer-like Chahagir , in which Menegozzo conjures up visions of a solitary litanist, whose each verse is repeated by the full con gregation until an overwhelming climax is reached. Similarly, Penderecki’s Cadenza builds up to a central highpoint before retreating again into silence, and Britten’s early Elegy undulates its precociously expres sive way through the viola’s four strings. In Reger’s G-minor Suite, Menegozzo finds effective ly contrasting sounds for the arpeggiated chords of the opening, the sharply articulated double stops of the scherzo-like second movement, the singing thirds of the third one, and the perpetuum mobile of the finale. She is obviously a sensualist of sound, a breed for which I have a very soft spot. On the minus side, I found her Hindemith rendition way too free in its rubato, in a way that doesn’t make much sense and disconcerts the listener. Hindemith was very strict that the rhythm behind the rubato should always be recognizable! Also, Menegozzo slows down massively for the triplets in the Sehr frisch und straff to rather strange effect. Penderecki’s Sarabanda similarly suf fers from some mannered rubato, and in the Stravinsky Élégie , Menegozzo makes too much of the numerous commas in the score, to the detriment of melodic continuity. But then again, this is arguably a matter of personal taste, and I wouldn’t wish anyone to miss out on Laura Menegozzo’s—and her Testore’s!—recording, which is technically first-rate.

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