JS Bach • Britten • Telemann • Shaw
Telemann: Fantasia No. 1 in B flat major, TWV 40:14; Fantasia No. 7 in E flat major, TWV 40:20 (both Trans. viola); Caroline Shaw: in manus tuas (version for solo viola); Britten: Elegy for Solo Viola; JS Bach: Partita No. 2 in D minor, BWV 1004 (Trans. viola)
Timothy Ridout (viola)
Harmonia Mundi HMM902750 61:08 mins
Clip: Caroline Shaw - in manus tuas (Version for Solo Viola, performed by Timothy Ridout)
From the shadows of chamber and orchestral music where it is so often overshadowed, the viola here emerges as a hero in its own right, the glorious sound of the unaccompanied instrument (apparently a Peregrino Di Zanetto of c.1570, though the booklet does not reveal this) resonating from the very first note and sustained throughout this exceptionally thoughtful and well-recorded collection. This is an album that proclaims the viola as a distinctive, individual solo instrument, ideally served here by its skilled interpreter.
Timothy Ridout interleaves arrangements of three 18th-century pieces with two contemporary essays. The piece by Caroline Shaw was originally written for cello, but the composer herself uses the viola on film: it’s an evocative musing on a Tallis motet, imagined as if heard in a single moment, starting with mere wisps of music leading to cross-writing that inevitably points back to Bach. The unearthly quality of the writing is highlighted by a few haunting added vocal sounds, not advertised as part of the performer’s role, but in Shaw’s score.
The Britten is very early, a teenage work from the same months that produced the miraculous little ‘Hymn to the Virgin’. It was unpublished until after his death, and he never called it Elegy. Because he wrote it on the day he left Gresham’s School, it has been connected with his experiences there, but we can surely hear it more generally as eloquently lonely, deeply introspective; it is beautifully delivered here.
Ridout cultivates a lovely sweep and dance-like tread in the two Telemann Fantasias (solo violin pieces anonymously transcribed for viola). The fast movements fairly bubble with wit, but in the slow movements Ridout arguably lingers a little where, for example, the slurred pairs of notes could be more separated to help the music move. These lively but scarcely deep Fantasias set the scene for Bach’s famous D minor Partita, transposed to a fifth below that key, so sounding in G minor, in an arrangement by fellow violist Simon Rowland-Jones. Thus it acquires a rich expressiveness that avoids the wirier tone of some violin performances of the piece, but makes remarkably little difference to the overall shape of the work.
Ridout lifts the Allemande airily, and while the Courante hovers on the edge of too fast and the Sarabande arguably a little over-heavy, the Gigue is perfectly poised. Then comes the great Chaconne, in a remarkable account that manages to be both weighty and transparent. Ridout’s playing is sonorous, but he also lets the music breathe: the first beat of each bar in the theme is nicely lifted, staccato variations fly sharply by, and the cross-string writing acquires tremendous force. The central section in the major, starting as if tentatively, becomes rhapsodic, rhythmically free, using the multiple-stopping to push forward the ever-evolving architecture into the passionate final section. Technically, this Chaconne seems to sum up Ridout’s whole approach as a creative combination of sustained sound with musical argument, perfectly balanced.This is a marvellously musical and sonically superb album. Nicholas Kenyon