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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”!