Review: Two Violas: All Saints’ Church, Jesus Lane, Cambridge

The lovely so-called ‘Painted Church’ dating back to the 1860s, a Gothic Revival masterpiece on Jesus Lane, Cambridge, was the splendid setting for a concert last Friday evening (14 March) given by three high-profile musicians - the violist duo Peter Mallinson and Matthias Wiesner, and their piano accompanist Lynn Arnold.

Peter and Matthias, both members of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and who have been performing viola duos together since 2013, thought at that time it might be a valuable departure from their orchestral commitments to embark on something of a contrast and introduce music for two violas that was perhaps new, or at least unfamiliar into the repertoire.

This would fill a gap in the availability of work regrettably under-explored and as a consequence under-appreciated.

The result was the first of their discs devoted to such music, and Friday evening’s performance promoted a selection from their new, and fourth, CD titled Two Violas: Regeneration, denoting something appropriately regenerative in each piece selected for Friday evening’s recital.

Although the focus of the partnership is music for their particular instruments it is also often performed with exponents of other instruments, as in this particular concert with Lynn Arnold.

Two violas is actually a device which has inspired composers for centuries and has a very rich history.

But although audiences are familiar with the viola as an orchestral instrument, and one with a prominent role in string quartets and quintets, a pairing of two violas is comparatively unfamiliar and its repertoire becomes increasingly rare in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

There are challenges of variety and contrast peculiar to like instruments which are not of the same kind for duos comprising unlike instruments.

By way of something of a comparison, because the repertoire for solo trumpet is not as extensive as for that, say, of the solo piano or violin, trumpet virtuoso Alison Balsom has been encouraged to seek out works with the potential for successful transcription or to invent new ones.

Similarly commissioning pieces and creating arrangements of existing material is also often the way forward for duo violists.

For Peter Mallinson the repertoire for the viola comes foremost and he looks for ways of bringing pieces together so that audiences are enabled to appreciate not only the longevity, but also the versatility and modernity of the viola duo and to think about music in new ways.

Friday evening’s performance by Peter and Matthias was made up of a selection of pieces from the CD with its various arrangements and compositions old and new.

Starting with Iain Farrington’s arrangement of JS Bach’s Sonata in G minor (BWV 1029) the rich sound of two violas playing together was immediately apparent.

The violists followed Bach with Raymond Yiu’s Three Shidaiqu Transcriptions, Shidaiqu being the name given to the earliest form of Chinese popular music.

Its combination of East and West deriving from American jazz musicians going to work in dance clubs in Shanghai and collaborating with the local folk performers would eventually fall foul of the cultural expectations of the People’s Republic who thought of such music as decadent.

But the rich cultural significance of a genre once banned is now re-emerging, and is a good example of just one of the many ways the two violists envision ‘regeneration’ in every example on their new disc.

At the end of these rather attractive Shidaiqu Transcriptions your reviewer was surprised when he found that he had been unwittingly sitting next to the composer all along.

Raymond Yiu duly walked up to the platform and took his bow.

The narrow cloudy train of female stars which make up the seven sisters of the Pleiades were each given a virtuosic otherworldly musical representation in a work by Detlev Glanert (The Pleiades) while Peter Letanka’s Gershwinian Nostalgia was an arrangement of Gershwin’s I Got Rhythm, Summertime, and It Ain’t Necessarily So, with some excellent jazz/boogie accompaniment from Lynn Arnold whose talents at the keyboard shone throughout.

Dan Jenkins’s arrangement of Elgar’s The Wild Bears from the latter’s Wand of Youth suite brought the evening’s collection to a conclusion with some wild vivace playing from the two violists.

A pair of violas together has its own particular sound. In all, this was a most engaging hour of music that displayed in the compositions chosen the rich history of viola duos with their distinctive sonorities and in music of widely different moods.