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Burnished and emblazoned
behind this latest release from Guild
is the immortal name of Lionel Tertis.
If his predecessor in the British viola
hierarchy, Alfred Hobday, is the now
unsung pioneer of standard setting in
orchestral and chamber playing, Tertis
was the onlie begetter. The raft
of composers who wrote for him encore,
sonata and concertante pieces enriched
the repertoire of adventurous violists
and gave them the fruits of Tertis’
pioneering and indefatigable zeal. With
the obvious exception of Canto Popolare
in this disc, most here were written
for Tertis.
Many are suited to
show off Tertis’s gorgeous depth of
tone and legato phrasing; the technical
command he evinced is also shown in,
say, the in alt playing demands
of Eric Coates – a fellow viola player
and colleague – in First Meeting.
With the mute on, Rebecca Clarke’s
impressionistic reverie in Morpheus
is as potent as ever. Tertis greatly
admired Benjamin Dale and lost few opportunities
to programme his music, doing so in
Germany and America as well as his native
country. Violist Dame Avril Piston and
Shamonia Harpa catch the alluring sway
and glint of the music as much as its
stormier impressionism. Their Elgar
is soft and reverent, rather reserved
and not rising to a peak – attractively
withdrawn. They espouse Rowley’s Aubade,
an unlikely but humorous paraphrase
of O Mistress Mine and bring
courtly elegance to Moffat’s Longing
and wistfulness to the piece that gives
the disc its title, Adam Carse’s Heartache
(somewhat over emotionalised a title,
I think). They come under a bit of pressure
in Bridge’s Allegro appassionato
happily coupled with the delightful
Pensiero. The recital ends with
the becalmed effulgence of a piece by
Tertis himself, Sunset. This
is a piece the Master recorded for Vocalion
in the early 1920s. His rich, sensuous
tone and quicksilver emotive responses
are part and parcel of his Kreisleresque
late Romantic aesthetic. Dame Avril
and Miss Harpa sound rather more streamlined
and affectionate by comparison.
Which brings us to
the most remarkable part of this winning
collection of English viola morceaux.
Dame Avril was 82 when she recorded
these pieces and her partner – pianistic
and life companion as the booklet tactfully
puts it - was a mere 81. Dame Avril
was born in Rhodesia and studied in
London with, inter alia, Bernard Shore
and John Dyer before studying with Tertis
himself. Her wanderings have taken her
to India and to Peru and also to the
surgeon’s knife; Dame Avril was not
always a dame. Her companion Shamonia
Harpa studied at the RAM with York Bowen.
Indeed she has apparently played all
four of her teacher’s Piano Concertos
in Bombay – which is where I assume
she met Dame Avril. In any event it’s
an amazing feat – even York Bowen barely
managed to perform his own concertos,
let alone in Bombay. They now live in
well-earned retirement in Faccombe in
Hampshire. Curiously, as I was completing
this review I had a telephone call from
an old friend whose father was in the
Indian civil service during the Second
War. When I told him of this disc he
reminded me that his father had once
heard a remarkable young woman playing
the piano at the residence of the Maharajah
of Mysore. Not only had she sight-read
the piano reduction of John Foulds’s
A World Requiem almost flawlessly
(Foulds of course having being a significant
figure in Delhi and Calcutta) but she
had in her early youth suffered a crippling
injury that had necessitated the amputation
of all four fingers of her left hand
(Dame Avril’s teacher Bernard Shore
ironically had himself lost part of
two fingers during war service). This
remarkable and courageous young woman
used the stumps of the fingers of her
left hand to play the harmony whilst
balancing her hand with an upturned
thumb. Perhaps Dame Avril and Miss Harpa
remember her and could verify whether
she was, indeed, as she claimed, Foulds’s
illegitimate daughter by the Ranee of
Sarawak.
I think only Milstein
could match Dame Avril’s prodigious
accomplishments at so advanced an age;
indeed the larger instrument creates
even greater problems for the instrumentalist
in stretching and fingering. My old
friend suggested to me that the forenames
of these hitherto-unknown musicians
– Avril and Shamonia – might be construed
as meaning April Fool and that this
disc is one long viola joke writ large.
It is, I am afraid, symptomatic of these
low, dishonest, suspicious times that
such a jaundiced view could be held
by an otherwise sensitive man. For there
is much more to be recorded by these
gallant and accomplished ladies – more
Tertis, and then the works of his contemporary,
H Waldo Warner, violist of the London
String Quartet. Another album would
be delightful. But at 84 and 83 respectively
it would be ungallant to insist they
journey from their retirement home to
Potton Hall in Suffolk. Guild should
do the right thing and take its recording
equipment and go to Faccombe.
Jonathan Woolf
Dame Avril Piston (viola) 