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Caroline Castleton’s glorious Rebecca Clarke, The Violist: Her Career and Performance Practice on an Emerging Solo Instrument in the Early Twentieth Century (DMA diss., University of Maryland, College Park, 2023) has just been published, and you need to get your copy now.

This is the absolutely the finest thing ever written about Clarke’s performing career, her instrumental technique, her writing for the viola, and her role as a public advocate for the instrument on a par with Tertis and Primrose, and ahead of both of them on the international circuit. It’s a vital resource for anyone seriously interested in Clarke, and—miracle of miracles—it is fully accessible to general readers, without stinting so much as a jot in academic rigor and technical detail.

Click here for an abstract, a full table of contents, and a generous sample, but to whet your appetite, consider that Castleton goes full-tilt on Clarke’s performance materials for her own Sonata and Dumka, along with bedrock repertoire by other composers, and a couple of her own arrangements that were first published only the other day, all generously illustrated with reproductions of the manuscripts and marked parts, historic photos, and newspaper-clippings. Appendices include a reproduction of Clarke’s autograph cadenza to the “Handel”/Casadesus Concerto, photographs of Clarke’s viola, and comprehensive tallies of Clarke’s BBC broadcasts and recital appearances.

Order here or here. It’s available in cloth and paper, in five different formats, and in PDF, for immediate download, all under Pub ID 30422290. You may also order by phone, at +1 800-521-0600 (press 2, then press 1), where Proquest’s incredibly kind and helpful dissertation team will help you, Monday through Friday, 8:00 am–6:00 pm US Eastern Time. In case of trouble, email them at disspub@proquest.com.

Sample pages below. You may also like to check out Castleton’s degree recital, which offers practical demonstrations of points developed in the dissertation.

Sample pages from Caroline Maxwell Castleton, Rebecca Clarke, The Violist: Her Career and Performance Practice on an Emerging Solo Instrument in the Early Twentieth Century (DMA diss., University of Maryland, College Park, 2023; Proquest 30422290).
Copyright © 2023, Caroline Maxwell Castleton.

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Just in time for Clarke’s 134th birthday comes a truly fine account of her Sonata by our friends Mei-Chun Chen and Hsin-I Huang, whose performance of three of Clarke’s songs, in Chen’s transcriptions, we told you about the other day. Everything about their take on the Sonata is special, from the passionate urgency of the opening gesture…

…to the hint of burnished steel in the scherzo…

…to the grave, almost reverent, solemnity of the slow movement, and the extreme tension driving the transition to the finale, which makes you wonder if Clarke didn’t have the comparable moment in Beethoven’s Fifth at least faintly in mind:

The other thing that cries out for comment is the platform-manner on view here. Clarke was an accomplished stage-animal—she stood nearly six feet tall in her prime and, as one observer noted, “she strode onstage like a goddess”—so I think she would have appreciated the exquisite purposive control that lies behind every gesture in this performance. The bowed head at the beginning of the slow movement is eloquent. Even the page-turns are expressive.

Wherever Clarke is, we hope she’s smiling. Happy birthday, pal.

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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”!