Viola player Rose Wollman’s collection with pianist Dror Baitel is described as a celebration of “women who were told ‘no’ and did it anyway”. The earliest composer here, Amy Beach, was the first US woman to compose and publish a symphony; Florence Price was the first African American woman to have one of her works played by an American orchestra, while Libby Larsen, the only living composer included, was the first woman to have a residency with a US band. The fourth composer on the disc is the British-born Rebecca Clarke, who studied with Charles Stanford at the Royal College of Music and was a viola pupil of Lionel Tertis, and subsequently spent much of her life in the US, living there permanently from the outbreak of the second world war until her death in 1979 at the age of 93.
While Beach and Price are both represented by miniatures – the three pieces of Beach’s Op 40, and Price’s Elfentanz – Wollman and Baitel also play two much more substantial viola sonatas. Larsen’s is a curious piece, beginning as though it’s a sonata that Hindemith somehow forgot he’d written, before veering into mambo and jazz and finishing up with a Bartók-like moto perpetuo.
But it’s Clarke’s sonata, first performed in 1919, that’s by some distance the finest music here, a big-boned, three-movement work that shows its confidence and originality in every bar, underlining what a huge loss to music on both sides of the Atlantic it was that Clarke composed so little of real substance after it. Wollman and Baitel’s performances of all the pieces here are efficient and characterful, but in the larger-scale works they sometimes seem to lack intensity; a comparison between their performance of Clarke’s sonata and the recording by Tabea Zimmermann and Kirill Gerstein on Myrios shows the dimension that’s missing here.
