A PRECIOUS GIFT

Benjamin Britten’s 19th-century viola was a present to him from Frank Bridge. Violist Hélène Clément speaks to Carlos María Solare about recording an album featuring music by both composers on which this remarkable instrument takes centre stage

Mostreaders of The Strad will be familiar with the fact that both the composer Bridge and his pupil Britten were proficient viola players.

Mainly a chamber musician, Bridge was a member of the English Quartet, premiering many works by his contemporaries as well as a few by himself. Britten didn’t play the viola professionally, but he did make a recording on it: on the last 78rpm side of the Zorian Quartet’s 1946 album of his String Quartet no.2, the composer joined the ensemble for Purcell’s five-part Fantasia upon One Note, holding the eponymous middle C for the four minutes of the piece’s duration!

GERARD COLLETT PHOTOGRAPHY

‘WHAT APPEALED TO ME MOST WAS THIS VIOLA’S SOFT QUALITY. THIS WAS THE SOUND THROUGH WHICH I WANTED TO EXPRESS MYSELF’ –

The instrument Britten played on that recording had been given to him by Bridge as a farewell present when he and Peter Pears left for the US shortly before the beginning of the Second World War (it turned out to be the last time Bridge and Britten saw each other). It was made in 1843 by the Milanese luthier Francesco Giussani, of whom no other instruments are known. Giussani was also a professional viola player; he is listed as principal viola in the orchestra of Milan’s Teatro Re in the 1830s. The instrument – with a back length of 16.25 inches (412mm) – was sold to Bridge in 1905 by W.E. Hill & Sons (in their certificate, the maker’s name is misspelt as ‘Guissani’). Britten continued to play it occasionally at private musical gatherings, and in 1970 he loaned it to Cecil Aronowitz, who probably used it for the UK premiere of the string orchestral version of the composer’s Lachrymae, given at the Aldeburgh Festival in 1977. From the early 1980s until 2009, the viola was played by Paul Cassidy of the Brodsky Quartet.

When in 2018 the Doric Quartet was preparing to record Britten’s works for string quartet, the Britten estate approached the group’s violist, Hélène Clément, with the suggestion that she use the composer’s instrument (instead of her own by Stephan von Baehr). ‘At first I was sceptical,’ recalls Clément. ‘I was very happy with my own instrument and didn’t want to play Britten’s viola just as a gimmick. It hadn’t been played on for a while, so my first encounter with it was difficult, but I was smitten and ended up playing it at my next concert and, of course, in the recording!’ The viola proved a good fit with the Doric’s sound, and has since become Clément’s main instrument. ‘What appealed to me most was the viola’s soft quality, its intimate sound: it’s not too direct or loud but has multiple, complex qualities. Violas can be very different from each other, but I felt that this was the sound through which I wanted to express myself.’

Clément claims that the instrument has ‘completely changed’ her musical language in the few years she has been playing it, and for that reason the project of recording viola music by the two composers who previously owned it is very important to her. ‘The suggestion came from Ralph Couzens of Chandos Records,’ she explains, ‘who was also instrumental in selecting a handful of pieces that make for a rounded programme.’ The main piece on the album is Clément’s own transcription of Bridge’s Cello Sonata, which she finds ‘works incredibly well on the viola, with just a few tweaks. Bridge has a special way of using the various registers, which I took care to preserve. The piece begins as if from nowhere, very gently and eager to rise. When the second subject appears, it should be up there, where the music has been aiming to arrive.

Hélène Clément, Alasdair Beatson and Sarah Connolly at Potton Hall

SIMON ASTRIDGE

Another existing arrangement goes down, making the passage more grounded, but I feel it needs to be elated.Consequently, I spend quite a bit of time high up on the fingerboard!’

Clément’s programme is bookended by Bridge’s Sonata and Britten’s Lachrymae for viola and piano. When performing it live prior to the recording, she would sometimes place the former piece with its ‘romantic outburst’ at the beginning of the recital, sometimes at the end. The printed edition of Lachrymae was edited by the piece’s dedicatee William Primrose in his typically idiosyncratic way, where the effects can sometimes get in the way of the music, finds Clément. ‘When an ascending scale disappears into nothing, you don’t need a showy harmonic at the end: you just need to make a soft sound!’

The other original composition of Britten’s included on the album is the unaccompanied (posthumously titled) Elegy that he wrote upon leaving Gresham’s School in August 1930, at the age of 16. The score includes several fingerings stemming from the composer, but Clément doesn’t feel necessarily bound by them. ‘It’s always interesting to see what the composer or the first performers did, but you don’t have to do it if it doesn’t agree with you. The important thing is always to be extremely respectful, since we are just the music’s mediators. I don’t do all of Britten’s fingerings, but there are some beautiful moments in the Elegy, such as an incredibly gentle slide towards the end.’

The recording took place at Potton Hall in Suffolk, practically ‘down the road from Aldeburgh’, recalls Clément. ‘We recorded in long takes, without much splicing, as the phrases are long and sink into one another.’ As we spoke in April, she was looking forward to hearing the edits but was already enthusing about sound engineer Jonathan Cooper, with whom she has worked a lot. ‘He has a way of recording that is very intimate; the sound that comes across is never beautified but always natural. With him you get the real message of the sound, without acoustic enhancement.’

The recording also includes the transcription for viola and piano that Britten made in December 1932 of his teacher’s Shakespearean tone poem There Is a Willow Grows aslant a Brook; and Bridge’s Three Songs with viola obbligato, in which Clément and her piano partner Alasdair Beatson are joined by mezzo-soprano Sarah Connolly.

Revealing that they met to cook together, Clément enthuses about Connolly’s ‘ideal melange of incredible strongmindedness about her own singing and at the same time open-mindedness when it comes to making music. And she is completely inside the language, having sung so much music by both composers.’

The violist at the 1908 premiere of Bridge’s songs was Audrey Ffolkes, who would later, in 1923 (as Audrey Alston), become the nine-year-old Britten’s viola teacher and eventually introduce him to Bridge in the autumn of 1927. By then, the precocious young composer had already written a number of pieces for the instrument that remain unpublished. Let us hope that these too, at some point, might materialise in a recording.

WORKS Bridge Cello Sonata (arr. Clément); There Is a Willow Grows aslant a Brook (arr.Britten); Three Songs Britten Elegy; Lachrymae: Reflections on a Song of John Dowland op.48

ARTISTS Hélène Clément (va) Sarah Connolly (mezzo) Alasdair Beatson (piano)

RECORDING VENUE Potton Hall, Dunwich, UK RECORDING DATES 18–20 December 2021

CATALOGUE NUMBER Chandos CHAN 20247

RELEASE DATE 29 July 2022