1919 Viola Sonatas
Joseph Ryelandt (1870-1965)
Viola Sonata, Op.73 (1919)
Marcelle Soulange (1894-1970)
Viola Sonata, Op.25 (1919)
Arthur Foote (1853-1937)
Viola Sonata, Op.78a (1919)
Sir Granville Bantock (1868-1946)
Viola Sonata in F major; III Vivace
Hillary Herndon (viola)
Wei-Chun Bernadette Lo (piano)
rec. 2020, Sandra G Powell Recital Hall, University of Tennessee, USA
MSR CLASSICS MS1701 [64]
The 1919 Berkshire Festival Competition remains well-known because of the tie between Ernest Bloch’s Suite and Rebecca Clarke’s Sonata but have you ever wondered about the other entrants? That’s the conceit underlying this release, though it’s no more than that; 72 works were submitted for the competition that year but there’s no evidence that the sonatas by Ryelandt, Soulange and Foote appeared at the competition which was presided over by Louis Bailly, best-known as the viola player in the Flonzaley Quartet. Other jurors included Harold Bauer and Frederick Stock. The sonatas might not have appeared but they were written in the right year, so this release is more a conspectus of works for viola written in 1919 than those that were definitively entered for the viola competition itself.
Joseph Ryelandt, a new name to me, was born in Bruges and his sonata, though completed in 1919, was not premiered until 1921 with the composer at the piano. It fuses tempestuous declamation with reflective intimacy and plaintive warmth and its slow movement is full of richness. With elegant turns of phrase and a most gracious, rather Old School element, the finale is perhaps the most immediately appealing movement, where exchanges between the two instruments are at their most giocoso. Marcelle Soulange enjoyed a successful career as performer, critic and teacher - her own teachers had included Paul Vidal and Nadia Boulanger. Her sonata was completed in November 1919, thus too late for the competition, which had been held in August and in 1921 was itself to win a second prize at a French chamber competition. This is a much more au courant work than Ryelandt’s, strongly rhapsodic-impressionist with Franckian hints, harmonically fresh and lyrically verdant. The Scherzo is in the best French traditions droll and witty and the slow movement circles quizzically for some time before finally settling. Darker matter seems to permeate the finale, but it soon resolves light-heartedly in cyclic fashion. This is an intriguing find.
Arthur Foote is the best-known of these three composers and his Sonata was originally cast for Cello. Conjecturally, Foote revised it for the festival but there’s no evidence that it was performed in this way until 1978. Foote’s sonata is a solid, nobly stated slice of late-Romanticism. Its slow movement is lyric-melancholic, as well as beingly deftly poetic, and its finale is decidedly central-European and attractive. There’s a bonus of the finale of Granville Bantock’s Sonata in F major – a ripely Irish piece of music that Bantock manages to extend to the seven-minute mark.
Hillary Herndon and Wei-Chun Bernadette Lo make a fine team and they’ve travelled with this programme in America where it has been successfully received. The acoustic and balances are both fine and the notes helpful. The three sonatas are all reflective of directions in composition at the time and are performed with real style.
Jonathan Woolf
