A major masterpiece from an important composer

Rebecca Clarke isn't quite a household name, but her 1919 Sonata for Viola and Piano has certainly hit a chord with the record-buying public, not to mention violists and their accompanists. A few months ago I counted 18 CDs featuring this fine work, and now we have another, with this new performance of the composer's own version for cello and piano. This vital, robust work is certainly worth the attention it gets, and it sounds great in this different guise. Cellist Raphael Wallfisch and pianist John York provide a fresh and lively take on the music, and through a close partnership and re-balancing of component parts, they've proven the viability of the music for these forces.

But this isn't the most important work on this new CD from Lyrita. Rather, it's the Rhapsody for cello and piano which Clarke wrote in 1923. This is as assured a work as the Viola Sonata, but in a more modernist style; York in this fine liner notes mentions Debussy, Ravel and Scriabin. I'm not really sure what to make of Clarke's choice of title, since this four-movement piece in sonata form isn't especially free in form or over-extravagant in style. It's only somewhat a Rhapsody in the English country-side folklore sense. The composer works more in that genre in some of the shorter pieces on this disc, especially the piece based on the Scottish song I'll bid my heart be still, though even there one hears as much Paris as the Highlands. Whatever it's called, though, the Rhapsody rises above even the Viola Sonata, and deserves much more attention than it's been able to get without a proper published score. Hopefully the upcoming performing edition by John York, with the support of the Rebecca Clarke Foundation, will bring the Rhapsody to more concerts, discs and streaming services in the future.

I love the idea of including newly composed pieces to a musical program of works by dead composers, especially if there's an interaction between the two. John York's Dialogue with Rebecca Clarke, originally written in 2007 for viola and piano, is an exploration of favourite themes and characteristic stylistic devices of Clarke, matched with York's own responses from a post-Clarke perspective. This is a sincere and musically interesting tribute which, like the especially committed playing of Wallfisch and York, must surely win Rebecca Clarke new admirers.

Recollected in Tranquillity

In the Preface to his Lyrical Ballads William Wordsworth wrote a famous passage that defines Romantic art:

I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.

I've been thinking about this a lot in the past few weeks, while listening to this recording by the Trio Shaham Erez Wallfisch over and over - way more than I normally do when reviewing a disc. That's partly because I love this music so much, but perhaps I was waiting for my own tranquillity in the face of such passionate music to gradually disappear, resulting in the sublimity everyone has come to expect from Dean's reviews.

As it happens I was recently watching episode 11 of Kenneth Clark's Civilisation, "The Worship of Nature", on YouTube. There was Clark quoting Wordsworth in front of Tintern Abbey, and, at about 21:00, the second movement of Brahms' Double Concerto played over scenes of the beautiful English countryside.



Watching this on TV back in 1970 or 71, I was struck by the beauty of the music, and its perfect match with the landscape and Wordsworth's poetry. It's stayed with me ever since. I hadn't noted then Clark's odd anachronism of pairing the 1798 poem with a piece written in 1887, but it still seems to fit perfectly. It's also odd that a piece characterized at the time as "unapproachable and joyless, ... obstinate and mechanical, ... cold and rigid..." should have become a by-word for the perfection of romantic feeling expressed in Wordsworth's poetry.

Perfection of romantic feeling is indeed a phrase I would use for this performance by cellist Raphael Wallfisch, violinist Hagai Shaham and the Staatsorchester Rheinische Philharmonie under conductor Daniel Raiskin. Eschewing the larger-than-life heroics of the famous (I almost said infamous, but didn't) Ma/Perlman/Barenboim version, this is integrated and controlled but not careful, with obvious love for Brahms and his music from everyone involved.

As to the piano trios, I very much agree with Jessica Duchen, who in an ArtsDesk review of a January 2016 Wigmore Hall concert praised the Trio SEW's classic musicianship: "These performers evoke musical values that today are beginning to seem 'old school', yet are as sterling solid as ever." I know I should let that sentence stand by itself, but this whole paragraph by Jessica, with its emotional response in whatever tranquility might exist while writing to deadline, is very apt for my own review:

After the interval Rachmaninov's very early, one-movement Trio élégiaque No 1 offered a powerful dose of exquisite melancholy before the trio let rip with the magnificence of Brahms's C major Trio Op 87. It’s a piece that suits this group down to the last semiquaver, matching maturity, assurance, technique and good nature throughout its journey. Notable qualities that leapt out of this performance included the choice of contrasting palettes in the scherzo, the long lines of violin and cello offsetting the whirling interjections of the piano, and a breathtaking episode in the finale in which Erez’s piano tone turned utterly luminous, as if by magic.

Looking backwards from the Double Concerto of 1887 to the three Trios (op. 101 of 1886, op. 87 of 1880-82, and op. 8 of 1854) we see layers of nostalgia and regret peeled back until we have the relatively raw longing of the first Trio, written soon after Brahms met Clara Schumann. Shaham, Erez and Wallfisch don't oversell this; they recognize and communicate a guarded response by Brahms to these powerful emotions. Even here, though, we have another layer, since the version we all know of this marvellous piece is Brahms' revision of 1886. In this veiled Romanticism the layers add up!

So we end at the beginning. Here is a marvellous video of a live performance of the op. 8 Trio, from Rotterdam in 2014.

Fine music in an honourable British tradition

When I first listened to Raphael Wallfisch playing the Gerald Finzi Cello Concerto, in this two-CD re-issue by Chandos (to be released in North American on May 27, 2016), I thought to myself that it was amazing, probably the greatest British Cello Concerto after the Elgar. Then I came across a link to this great short film on Wallfisch's website:

Wallfisch makes a good case, though I'm still inclined to consider his claim just a trifle hyperbolic. These are all fabulous recordings, from the mid-1980s to early-1990s but still sounding very good. I recently listened to Wallfisch's Bax Concerto when I reviewed the new Lionel Handy disc on Lyrita in March, and thought it very fine. The other works on this disc are less familiar, but they all owe a debt to Elgar's Cello Concerto of 1919. All except the bonus piece on the disc: the Stanford 3rd Rhapsody in the series of six he wrote before WWI. The Rhapsodies are all marvellous works, quoting Irish folk songs in a Brahms accent.

The Bliss Concerto is, for a work written in 1970, easy on the ears. The composer said about it, "There are no problems for the listener – only for the soloist." Though it's a bit lighter in tone than some of the other works here, it's tightly, symphonically, constructed. Rostropovich was right when he convinced Bliss to change its name from Concertino to Concerto. The Moeran Cello Concerto, from 1945, is perhaps closest to the Elgar model, with lovely long melodies and a keynote of nostalgia and sadness.

Wallfisch has the measure of all of this music, and this album is a perfect way to collect it, in spite of other strong performances on disc by such cellists as Lionel Handy, Yo Yo Ma, Guy Johnstone and Peers Coetmore (who was Moeran's wife). Wallfisch has strong support from Liverpool, London, Bournemouth and Belfast orchestras, and the low price makes this album a must-buy.

Here is the Stanford 3rd Rhapsody for Cello and Orchestra, from the 1990 Chandos album with Raphael Wallfisch and Vernon Handley conducting the Ulster Orchestra: