The viola gets some love on this week’s “Music from Marlboro.” We’ll hear two very different quintets, composed over a century apart, that yet reveal their creators’ shared affinity for the instrument’s dark, rich timbre.
Ralph Vaughan Williams’ “Phantasy Quintet,” written in 1912, was one of numerous works commissioned from England’s great composers by one Walter Wilson Cobbett, a businessman and amateur musician whose dual passions were chamber music and music of the Elizabethan era. (“Phantasy” was Cobbett’s preferred spelling.) The work is full of Tudor inflections and stamped by Vaughan Williams’ tell-tale love of folk music. Vaughan Williams doubles his violas, and the instrument is heard to great effect throughout the piece. We’ll hear a performance from the 1975 Marlboro Music Festival, with James Buswell and Sachiko Nakajima, violins; Philipp Naegele and Caroline Levine, viola; and Anne Martindale, cello.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, too, adds a second viola to his String Quintet No. 5 in D Major, K. 593. Composed in 1790, the work was recollected by the composer’s widow, Costanze, to have been written for another musical amateur, speculated to be Johann Trost. Trost must have been quite the gifted dilettante. He also knew Haydn from Esterhaza, and Haydn dedicated some of his quartets to him. When Haydn and Mozart played through the D Major Quintet together before Haydn’s first visit to London, the two men took turns indulging in the first viola part.
The work was known for centuries as the “Zigzag” because of an alteration to the original manuscript that modified what had been a descending chromatic figure in the final movement into something decidedly more humorous. We’ll hear a performance from Marlboro in 2005, with Sarah Kapustin and Diana Cohen, violins; Mark Holloway and Sebastian Krunnies, viola; and David Soyer, cello.
The two quintets will be divided by an evocative “Elegiac Trio” by Sir Arnold Bax, composed in 1916. The work, scored for flute, viola, and harp, appeared the year after Debussy’s trio for the same instrumental combination (which Bax may or may not have known). Its alluring melancholy emerged from a world at war. Bax was especially affected by escalating tensions between England and his beloved Ireland, which had just boiled over into violence with the Easter Rising. We’ll hear a performance of the trio from 1978, with Carol Wincenc, flute; Caroline Levine, viola; and Moya Wright, harp.
Leave your viola jokes in the comments section, if you must; then join me for more exceptional music-making from the archives of the Marlboro Music Festival, this Wednesday evening at 6 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
Marlboro School of Music and Festival: Official Page
