All British viola players of the last 100 years and more owe a huge debt to Lionel Tertis. Born in 1876 (on the same day as the great cellist Pablo Casals), Tertis became a champion of what at the beginning of his career was an overlooked and maligned instrument; through the brilliance of his playing, with its utterly distinctive vibrato influenced by hearing the violinist Fritz Kreisler, and in the wealth of music that he commissioned, the viola finally achieved status as a solo instrument in its own right.
Timothy Ridout’s tribute to his great predecessor mixes some of those bespoke pieces with a selection of the arrangements that Tertis and others made for his instrument. One of the composers who wrote most extensively for Tertis was Arnold Bax, including a very fine viola sonata, and it’s strange that Ridout’s selection contains nothing at all by Bax - perhaps he intends to devote a whole disc to those pieces in the future. But these two discs (on the first of which Ridout is partnered by the pianist Frank Dupree, and on the second by James Baillieu) are framed by substantial works – York Bowen’s Viola Sonata No 1, from 1904, and Rebecca Clarke’s sonata completed in 1919.
Both are played with wonderful sensitivity and effortlessly glowing tone by Ridout, but he and his colleagues lavish just as much attention and care on the 15 smaller-scale works with which they complete the discs. Some seem to me a bit questionable – I’m not convinced by the viola obbligato that Bowen adds to the first movement of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, for instance – but others, like Tertis’s own transcription of Fauré’s Élégie, usually heard as a cello piece, are a pure delight. Anyone who enjoys fine string playing shouldn’t hesitate to sample these performances.
Stream it on Apple Music (above) or on Spotify
