Bowen & Walton: Viola Concertos (SWR Music)
★★★★☆/★★★☆☆
It is nothing short of a scandal that not one concerto for viola and orchestra has broken into the standard concerthall repertoire. There are at least fifty violin concertos that get regularly played and half a dozen for cello and orchestra. Yet, among a plethora of viola concertos by good composers — from Arnold to Bartok, Schnittke to John Williams — not one gets as much as a half-chance for public attention. In any other field, this would be considered illegal discrimination.
The present release is a dazzling ear-opener. York Bowen, slightly younger than Ralph Vaughan Williams, was a shy chap who took a back-seat in the turn-of-century English musical renaissance. His viola concerto, written for the virtuosic Lionel Tertis, had a cheerful premiere in 1908, followed by a US hearing, before eight decades of silence.
The current performance by Diyang Mei, principal viola of the Berlin Philharmonic, is a bursting chocolate box of melodic and mushy temptations. Moments of drawing-room smooch mingle with what might easily be mistaken for a Hollywood cowboy film, except no such thing existed for another couple of decades. This is music that does not take itself or its listeners over-seriously and Dijang Mei plays it like Heifetz on roller-skates. Someone should run it past Kirill Petrenko, the Berlin Phil chief; I have a strong inkling he’d like it.
Walton’s viola concerto, also written for Tertis, is a fairly early work, dated 1929. Tertis found it ‘too modern’ and Paul Hindemith played the premiere. It has cherishable moments of English pastorality and none of the jitteriness of its time and place; but it’s not a patch on the violin concerto that Walton would write for Heifetz, or the cello concerto for Piatigorsky.
Still, well worth a spin, if only for the bassoon tune in the finale. Brett Dean, himself an ex-Berlin violist and composer, conducts the excellent Deutsche Radio Philharmonie with infectious proselytism. The humble viola needs all the shout-outs it can get.
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