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Never a dull moment, indeed! All kinds of online goodies over the next few weeks, including:

September 15: Chicago’s International Music Festival presents a smashing pair—Clarke’s Trio and Dinuk Wijeratne’s Love Triangle—performed by Janet Sung, Calum Cook, and Kuang-Hao Huang, at 5:45 p.m. Central Daylight Time (check here for your local equivalent). “Smashing,” quite literally—it’s hard to guess which of these pieces has the hardest knuckles, and one of them turned 99 years old six weeks ago.

On demand through October 6: The Archipelago Collective’s entire 2020 season, including a beautiful performance of Clarke’s Lullaby and Grotesque, can be had here for a mere $50, and educators may request free access here.

On demand through October 8: BBC’s Through the Night is rebroadcasting a riveting 2008 mini-recital of Clarke’s songs by Elizabeth Watts and Paul Turner (beginning at the 3:34:26 mark), and you need to catch it before it disappears back into the vault for another dozen years. Forget the academic canard that there was something small or in-turned about Clarke’s predilection for songs: Watts and Turner find real tragedy in Down by the Salley Gardens and A Dream, a flash of Isolde-like passion in Greeting, and very nearly the last ounce of horror in Eight O’clock. As my Alabama grandmother would have put it, this is sangin’!

October 12–November 1: Oxford Lieder offers exactly the sort of mixed grill Clarke and her buddies enjoyed serving up—in this case, voice (mezzo Caitlin Hulcup), violin (Jonathan Stone), and piano (artistic director Sholto Kynoch) in various combinations and permutations. There’s only one piece by Clarke—”The Tailor and His Mouse,” from Old English Songs, for voice and violin—but context is everything, and the program as a whole is wildly imaginative. Broadcast live from Holywell Music Room on October 12, at 17:30 British Summer Time (check here for your local equivalent), and then available on demand, with the same ticket, through November 1. £10 / £5 under 35.

October 27–28: And talk about wildly imaginative programming! Cultural Wasteland presents Danse macabre: Musical Tales of Horror from Rebecca Clarke, Berlioz and Saint-Saëns, with mezzo Heather Gallagher and pianist Yukiko Oba. The ample bill of fare includes five Clarke songs: The Seal Man; A Dream; Tiger, Tiger; The Donkey; and the rarely-heard Binnorie: A Ballad, an epic tale of love, jealousy, murder, and revenge, with enough creepy effects slithering out of the piano to give you a fabulous case of the wim-wams, just in time for Halloween. All that, plus an opportunity to hear Saint-Saëns’s Danse macabre and Berlioz’s Le Spectre de la rose in their original forms, for voice and piano. $20 on Sparrow Live, airing Tuesday, October 27, at 7:00 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, and then available for the next 24 hours (check here for your local equivalents, and please note that this is the correct date and time). We’ve already got our tickets. See you there. Bring popcorn.

Save the dates! On October 29, Clarke’s Trio headlines a concert in Wigmore Hall’s terrific new Live Stream series, 95 years (nearly to the day) after Clarke herself presented it there, with the Gould Trio stepping in for the original cast of characters: Adila Fachiri, May Mukle, and Myra Hess. The Sonata follows on December 8, with Natalie Clein performing Clarke’s alternate version for cello. Details to follow.

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If we called your attention to every performance of Rebecca Clarke’s Sonata, your inbox would fill up every ten minutes, and you’d drop us at once, so let’s not go there.

We do, however, need to alert you to the fact that the Sonata will be the lead-item in one of the most interesting events in this summer’s Tanglewood 2020 Online Festival: a viola-centric program that also features a fascinating array of pieces by Ulysses Kay, Luciano Berio, and Paul Hindemith, all of whom taught and/or studied at Tanglewood, which is just down the road from the site of Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge’s Berkshire Festival, where Clarke made her first big international splash as a composer, slightly more than a century ago, with—you guessed it—the Sonata.

The program, part of Tanglewood’s BSO Musicians in Recital series, debuts on July 31, 2020, at 8:00 p.m. EDT, and remains available through August 7.

Clarke and Mrs. Coolidge were famous innovators—Clarke as one of the earliest evangelists of the viola, and Mrs. Coolidge as a visionary programmer whose chamber-music festival was celebrated as the first thing of its kind ever given in the United States—so we imagine both of them would have been keenly interested in a concert that sets Clarke’s Sonata next to Kay’s Sonatine (1939), in what seems to be its world premiere, and then follows up with Berio’s Naturale, for viola, percussion, and recorded voice (1984), and finally circles back to 1919, with Hindemith’s Sonata, Op. 11, No. 4.

The performers—all members of the BSO—are violists Mary Ferrillo, Steven Laraia, and Daniel Getz; percussionist Kyle Brightwell; and pianist Brett Hodgdon. Ferrillo and Hodgdon do the honors in the Clarke.

Information, program-notes, and virtual tickets are available here.

See you, as it were, on the “The Lawn”!