The concert at the Atatürk Cultural Centre on January 16 featured a British viola-player performing a work by a British composer, so I naturally felt obliged to attend it. The Suite for Viola and Orchestra by Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958) is an eight-movement work that was written between 1933 and 1934. It was dedicated to, and first performed by, Lionel Tertis, a man of Polish-Jewish origin who was the premier British violist – i.e., viola-player – of his time.
Vaughan Williams is known for his distinctively English style on the one hand, and his rejection of the late romantic German style in music on the other. However, his ‘lush, pastoral’ string writing – the result of his strong interest in English folk song, modal harmonies and the music of the Tudor period – is occasionally interrupted by harsher passages varying in intensity from the merely angular to the outright abrasive, and he also had a penchant for frequently-changing rhythms. The Suite for Viola and Orchestra is a series of eight miniatures that exhibits all the above features (except, perhaps, the harshness) and features a prominent solo viola part.
The eight movements are divided into three groups: (1) a Prelude, Carol and Christmas Dance; (2) a Ballad and Moto Perpetuo; and (3) a Musette, Polka Mélancolique and Galop. In the following recording, which is accompanied by a viola-and-piano reduction of the score, the piece is being performed by the distinguished violist Frederick Riddle (1912–95) with the Bournemouth Sinfonietta, conducted by Norman Del Mar (1919–94). (One of Del Mar’s teachers of composition at the Royal College of Music, where he also studied horn-playing and conducting, was Vaughan Williams.) The notes under the YouTube version give you a brief description of each movement.
At the concert on January 16, Vaughan Williams’s Suite for Viola and Orchestra was performed by the Istanbul State Symphony Orchestra under the direction of their German guest conductor, Raoul Grüneis, the solo part being played by the young British violist Timothy Ridout. Trained at the Royal Academy of Music and the Kronberg Academy in Taunus, Germany, Ridout won first prize in the inaugural year of the Cecil Aronowitz International Viola Competition in 2014; then, in 2016, he won first prize in the Lionel Tertis International Viola Competition, established in 1980.
After some initial uncertainty, the woodwind department played well in the first movement – the Prelude. I especially enjoyed some back-and-forth duets involving the solo viola and a bassoon, and later the viola and a flute. The woodwinds also shone in the energetic Christmas Dance third movement, which incidentally illustrates the way this composer put English music on a different track by adopting a leaner approach to orchestration. (In 1907 and 1908 he took lessons from Maurice Ravel, a master orchestrator; Wikipedia informs us that these studies enabled Vaughan Williams to ‘clarify the textures of his music and free it from Teutonic influences’. I assume that in this context, ‘Teutonic’ refers to the works of German composers such as Beethoven, Wagner, Brahms and Richard Strauss, which have a fuller – perhaps, even, heavier – sound.) The Christmas Dance also features frequently changing rhythms – in this case, from 3/4 to 6/8 and back again.
In the wistful fourth movement, entitled Ballad, the violist gave an impressive display of quiet and subdued but intense and atmospheric playing, while in the fifth (Moto Perpetuo), which features some pleasing interjections by the harp, the rhythmic chopping and changing – as in the Christmas Dance, bars are divided sometimes into three shorter beats, and sometimes into two longer ones – was well handled by both the soloist and the orchestra. I have to say, though, that for Turkish musicians accustomed to the rhythms of their native folk music, this must have been a walk in the park.
William E. Everett, writing in the Journal of the American Viola Society (Vol 13 No 2, 1997), tells us that while the Ballad is pastoral in character, the Moto Perpetuo that follows it is ‘ominous’. ‘The movement is certainly the most virtuosic and technically challenging of any in the Suite,’ he says; ‘this is the dark, foreboding world of Vaughan Williams’s Fourth Symphony (composed 1931-34, first performed 1935), a work contemporary with the Suite.’ I would definitely agree with his description of the Moto Perpetuo as ‘virtuosic and technically challenging’, but for my money the Fourth Symphony, completed after the death in 1934 of the composer’s closest friend, Gustav Holst (of The Planets fame), is far more angst-ridden and turbulent than this comparatively anodyne walk in the dark. The Fourth Symphony is modernism at its most acerbic, prompting contemporary commentators to opine that it reflected the ‘naked violence triumphant in Europe’ after Hitler’s rise to power. Anyway, here is Everett’s full article. It starts on page 9.
My enjoyment of the Suite for Viola and Orchestra was enhanced by the fact that I had recently returned from spending the Christmas season in my native Tameside. There, I had had several walks in the Pennine foothills, and Vaughan Williams’s evocation of an idealised English countryside allowed me to indulge in a little nostalgia. This was especially so in Carol, the folk-song-like second movement – yet another example of changing rhythms (alternate bars are in 4/4 and 5/4, but the effect is one of even-paced smoothness rather than jerkiness). That is not to say, of course, that I did not appreciate Timothy Ridout’s faultless viola-playing – especially in the Moto Perpetuo movement touched on above – and the Istanbul State Symphony Orchestra’s sensitive accompaniments.
Having broached the subject of Vaughan Williams’s symphonies, I will add that I admire the later ones – not just the ‘serene’ Symphony No 5 (written in 1938-43 and dedicated to Jean Sibelius, who said complimentary things about it), but also his tougher, grimmer productions, two of these being the bleak, ‘post-nuclear’ last movement of the Symphony No 6 (1944–47) and the chilling Symphony No 7 (the ‘Sinfonia Antarctica’, partly based on his score for the film Scott of the Antarctic and completed in 1952). Also, when in a particularly laid-back mood I enjoy his The Lark Ascending, a romance for violin and orchestra in which I once played the horn. However, the piece that I regard as his masterwork is the Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis.
The Fantasia was written to be performed in Gloucester Cathedral, where it received its first hearing at the Three Choirs Festival in 1910. It is unusual in that it features three groups of musicians (two string orchestras and a string quartet) positioned in different parts of the building. Much of the writing is antiphonal, with lots of ghosting, in which a melody played by one of the ensembles is echoed by another. The modal harmonies the composer was so fond of work particularly well in this context as the Phrygian mode in which Tallis’s tune was written – this being the scale you get when you play the white notes on a piano starting on E – minimises any uncomfortable clashing when the two main groups launch out in different directions.
Vaughan Williams came across Tallis when he was editing The English Hymnal, a hymn book published for the Church of England in 1906. Thomas Tallis (c.1505-85) was a composer of mostly choral music – especially church anthems. One of these, Spem in Alium, was written for a choir divided into 40 parts; this may possibly be where Vaughan Williams got the idea of dividing the orchestra into different groups. (In the mid-1960s, I sang in a performance of this work in Manchester Cathedral.)
Here is a rendition of the Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by the late Sir Andrew Davis (1944–2024); it takes place in Gloucester Cathedral, the location of the work’s first hearing.
For those wishing to explore this ‘spacious and sonorous’ work in greater detail, there is an account of it by Mark Pullinger on the Bachtrack website. Not everyone liked the Fantasia, by the way: after its premiere, the organist of Gloucester Cathedral described it as ‘a queer, mad work by an odd fellow from Chelsea’.
But that will be quite enough Englishness for the time being: let us return to the concert in Istanbul on January 16. In the second half, the orchestra played Beethoven’s Symphony No 8 in F major, Opus 93. This four-movement work, completed in 1812, is the shortest of his symphonies and is mostly light-hearted in mood. Beethoven himself preferred it to his Symphony No 7, which he had only just completed when he began No 8. For my part, I recognise that the well-planned construction of No 8 is more formally satisfying than that of No 7, but the hauntingly beautiful Allegretto second movement of No 7 has no counterpart in No 8 – or indeed anywhere else in Beethoven’s oeuvre.
Carl Czerny, a pupil of his, said the great master was angered by the lack of enthusiasm with which his Symphony No 8 was greeted when first performed in Vienna in 1814, but Beethoven’s terrible conducting (he was growing increasingly deaf, and the orchestra largely ignored his ‘ungainly gestures’) may have had something to do with it. Also, the audience may have been expecting something less subtle and more demonstrative – something in the style either of his Symphony No 7, which was played immediately before this one and received wild applause, or of his ‘patriotic pot-boiler’ Wellington’s Victory, which was also on the progamme. Here are links to two descriptions of the work: the first is a concise piece, taken from notes by Misha Donat, on the Hyperion website, while the second is a more detailed, but still approachable, account by Thomas May on the Nashville Symphony website.
I thought the stars of the concert on January 16 were Raoul Grüneis, the conductor, who managed the rallentando (gradual slowing down) passages very successfully, performing some expressive contortions with his left hand in the second movement of the Beethoven; the violins, who stayed perfectly in tune even when playing in their potentially squeaky high register; the brass department, who roared out some rousing fanfares and gave us a couple of mellowly melodious horn duets; and – last but certainly not least – the young lady who bashed the kettledrums with such commendable verve, thus demolishing what has traditionally been a male prerogative.
