JAVS Spring 2024

him. 13 Clarke also frequented parties at the home of Paul and Muriel Draper, who hosted many of the leading musicians of the day. This is where she rubbed shoulders with Artur Rubenstein, Pablo Casals, Jacques Thibaud, and others. 14 Clarke spoke fondly of the Drapers and their parties even in her later years. 15 Some of the earliest reviews of Clarke’s solo playing appeared in 1913 after a concert at the Guildhall in Wells, Somerset, where she played an arrangement of Wagner’s Prieslied. The two reviews were somewhat contradictory: the Wells Journal found that, despite Clarke’s “delightful work in the quartettes,” her tempo was “taken too strictly all the way through and a gradation of tone lacking,” but the Shepton Mallet Journal extolled her “extremely attractive rendering … the grand tone produced from the viola being splendid in its purity and depth.” 16 In 1913 Clarke found greater financial stability as one of six women hired by the previously all-male Queen’s Hall Orchestra. Her acceptance was based on an audition in which she sight-read the viola part to Strauss’s Don Juan , a notoriously difficult excerpt which to this day appears on standard repertoire lists for orchestral auditions (fig. 2). 17 Her technical prowess was indisputable.

that year and 1924. The first documentation of this tour is a recital on September 19, 1916, in Sorosis Hall, San Francisco, in which Clarke and Mukle performed piano quartets by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Paul Juon. Advertising for the concert was mainly focused on Clarke and Mukle (fig. 3).

Figure 3. Advertisement for Clarke and Mukle concert at Sorosis Hall in San Francisco. Photo Source: San Francisco Examiner, September 17, 1916, 62.

It was during the 1916 tour that American newspapers began to take notice of Clarke as a soloist. In October, she shared the stage with soprano Johanna Kristoffy in a joint recital in Oakland, California, where she played viola solos with piano: Wagner’s Preislied , Bridge’s Melodie , one of Marais’s Old French Dances , and Grainger’s Sussex Mummer’s Christmas Carol . The Oakland Tribune gushed, “Miss Clarke, who is a member of the Arenyi string quartet of London and has an international reputation as a soloist with symphony orchestras, plays that rarely heard instrument—the viola.” 19 The account, while somewhat exaggerating Clarke’s accomplishments up to that point, exemplifies the enthusiastic reception she received in America. Earlier that month, a reporter for the San Francisco Examiner introduced his interview with Clarke and Mukle by praising the viola, as played by Clarke:

Figure 2. The first women to be admitted to the Queen’s Hall Orchestra.Clarke is on the lower left. Photo Courtesy of Christopher Johnson, rebeccaclarkecomposer.com.

The female performers in the Queen’s Hall Orchestra did not perform for the Promenade season until 1916. 18 While it’s possible that Clarke participated in the 1916 Promenade concerts, it was also in 1916 that she joined Mukle on the first of several international tours between

Journal of the American Viola Society / Vol. 40, No. 1, Spring 2024

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