The Viola: The heart of Chamber Music
- Dan Chapman
- 17 minutes ago
- 3 min read
The viola brings to chamber music an especially emotionally charged role, binding groups together with its beautiful ochre palette of sound, singing in its distinctive ‘dusky’ tones; the strong and subtle inner voice of the music. For the 2025 festival we welcome back two internationally acclaimed violist Hélène Clément and Gary Pomeroy who will be at the heart of the festival’s programme.
In her recital with Katya Apekisheva, Hélène plays three iconic works for the viola. Frank Bridge’s early miniatures Pensiero and Allegro Appassionato were written around 1906 and provide a lovely showcase for Bridge’s early style. Very much a reflection of their time and place – a haunting mixture of French impressionism, English folk modality and an atmosphere of wistful reverie. Bridge was a professional violist.
Hélène plays on the viola that used to belong to Frank Bridge (and then Benjamin Britten) so what could be better than to hear her play these beautiful pieces on his very own instrument?
The British composer Rebecca Clarke was one of the first women to support herself as a professional viola player. Her Viola Sonata is the most impressive and well-known of her compositions, written in 1918/19 - a passionate three-movement sonata, the work roves across the viola’s whole range, steeped in the English pastoral sound-world.
Shostakovich chose the viola for his last work. He composed the greater part of it in June and July 1975 and died, of lung cancer, on 9 August. His Viola Sonata Op. 147 includes a homage to Beethoven whose Moonlight Sonata pervades the long finale, the emotional core of the piece. The mood of Shostakovich’s Viola Sonata is difficult to define; not angry, not optimistic, but certainly not despondent — perhaps weary, perhaps even consoling (the sonata ends on a major chord); perhaps transcendence in the final notes that the genius Russian composer was ever to write.
Mozart and Brahms String (Viola) Quintets
Throughout his life Mozart loved the autumnal sonority of the viola, always his instrument of choice when he played chamber music with friends. Knowing it literally from the inside the seventeen-year old Mozart was keen to work in a medium that enabled him to explore inner-part writing (the violas natural domain) and to indulge his fondness for the viola’s darker textures, so giving his compositional palette more and different sounds. What better than to add a viola to the string quartet, established as a key chamber music genre by his older friend and mentor, Haydn.
Mozart’s String Quintet in B flat major K174 is much more relaxed in the style of a divertimento and is more spaciously conceived than his early quartets. So the teenage Wolfgang is clearly already revealing his genius for sonority, colour, wit and inventiveness, all baked into this delightful piece; hardly ‘early Mozart’ but an already fully formed genius. This was in 1773.
Brahms, of course, also knew all about the viola’s sound world and role in binding together ensembles. The difference here is that, over one hundred years on from the fledgling Mozart’s quintet, the fifty-seven year old Brahms claimed that his String Quintet in G major, No. 2 Op. 111 was going to be his last ever composed work (in fact it wasn’t). In the summer of 1890 Brahms was out of the heat of Vienna staying in a favoured spot, the countryside east of Salzburg (location for the ‘Sound of Music’). There in his contentment he composed what his biographer Walter Niemann called “the most passionate, the freshest, and the most deeply inspired by nature” of all his works—the String Quintet No. 2 in G Major, op. 111. Originally envisaged as sketches for a fifth symphony it ended up as a string quintet with two violas. At any rate, the G major quintet is a breath-taking piece, almost orchestral in conception, creating the effect of far more than five instruments.
Come and hear the voice of the viola in the 2025 festival – Its beautiful dark tones shining through in Hélène Clément and Katya Apekisheva’s recital (Event 3)– three iconic viola masterpieces (Frank Bridge Rebecca Clarke and Shostakovich) hear the epic ‘viola’ quintets by Mozart and Brahms (Event 5) not to mention all six string players on stage for the mesmerizing, passionate String Sextet by Schoenberg (Event 2)
