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Just a touch late, but this entrancing take on Clarke’s Chinese Puzzle, by members of the Ulster Orchestra, popped up only this morning:

Gongbo Jiang, violin, Wenhan Jiang, viola, and Thomas Isaac, cello

This is an arrangement—uncredited, but absolutely terrific, and one that I think Clarke would have loved. The original is for violin and piano, but she herself made arrangements for viola and piano, and for a ravishing mixed ensemble of violin, flute, viola, cello, and piano (details here), and the piece was always a winner for her in concert, so what’s one more arrangement among friends?

The tune is one that a Chinese classmate of Clarke’s brother Hans hummed while spending weekends at the Clarke home in Harrow, England, in the early 1900s. Many years later, while on tour in Peking, Clarke checked out her transcription with a native colleague, who confirmed its accuracy, but blushed to say that it had words that he could not repeat in polite company.

And on that cheerful note, we wish you happy puzzling, and a very prosperous Year of the Dragon!

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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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Unless we’ve missed something, every note that Rebecca Clarke wrote for the viola, her chosen instrument, is now in print, with the publication of her arrangements of works by Percy Grainger, Stanley Marchant, and Sir Hubert Parry, and her cadenza to the “Handel”/Casadesus Concerto in B Minor, by Sleepy Puppy Press. Print and digital editions are available.

These are terrific pieces in their own right—Grainger’s Sussex Mummer’s Christmas Carol is familiar in its original form, for cello or violin, but Parry’s Sarabande and Marchant’s setting of Londonderry Air, both originally for violin, will be welcome re-additions to the repertoire—and they’re of particular interest in showing how Clarke displayed her gifts as a player, while demonstrating the distinctive qualities of the instrument. To that end, Clarke’s markings have been painstakingly reproduced, including her fingerings, bowings, and timings. Caroline Castleton’s crisp introduction lays all this out for you.

Clarke stood nearly six feet tall in her prime, and she had exceptionally long, elegant arms and fingers, as shown in the cover art. She deliberately undermarked her publications, so as not to bind violists with different physical attributes, which means that you should take the markings in this album seriously, but not literally—”for interest only,” as they say. Still, it’s a fascinating set of insights into Clarke’s own style and methods, and thus uniquely valuable.

Also, barring some unexpected discovery, you now have Rebecca Clarke’s Absolutely, Totally, Positively 100% Complete Works for Viola, so what are you waiting for?

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OUT TODAY! A BEAUTIFUL CD THAT PUTS THE SONATA IN A WHOLE NEW LIGHT

Just as we launch our new Rebecca Clarke discography, there comes Silhouettes, a gorgeous new release from Channel Classics that situates Clarke’s Viola Sonata (1919) right where it belongs—in close relationship with the cosmopolitan European modernism centered in Paris in the immediate aftermath of World War I, when Maurice Ravel was still a hot new thing out near the cutting edge, and Clarke was in a position not only to play much of his chamber music before the ink on it was quite dry, but to play some of it under his own wayward baton, and to read his Tarot—to alarming effect—at the after-concert party.

For Dana Zemtsov, the violist on Silhouettes, which releases today worldwide, the Sonata breathes a French atmosphere—“It has this French smell,” she says, in a charming “making of” video—and in the hands of Zemtsov and pianist Anna Fedorova, it most assuredly does, sitting comfortably, as if at home, at the head of a substantial, richly varied program of French and French-influenced works by Debussy, Milhaud, Enescu, and Arne Werkman.

For all the attempts to shoehorn Clarke into the “English Musical Renaissance,” she never quite fit there. In fact, she was in thrall to Debussy, and she worshipped Pelléas—early in her career as a jobbing violist, she blew two week’s rent on a copy of the vocal score, then hot off the presses, as a birthday present to herself. The inspiration showed plainly in her own work, as most of the Sonata’s earliest critics saw at once: “Its style is the happiest combination of British and French,” one rejoiced, while another was blown away by the opening of the final movement, where Clarke showed “her greatest genius, for here the music is mystical and macabre, in places as poignant, as moving as anything heard in the death chamber of Mélisande.” And then there’s the famous story of the 1919 Coolidge competition, where the Sonata—entered anonymously, as required—deadlocked for the prize, and when the seals were broken, the judges were astounded to learn that the piece that they thought to be “the work of a poet,” whom several of them assumed was Maurice Ravel, was not only by a woman, but by an Englishwoman at that.

Zemtsov and Fedorova’s performance of the Sonata is outstanding—by turns sensitive, passionate, and dry-eyed, as needed—with just the right touch of portamento in the lyrical passages, and real wit in the scherzo. The contrapuntal equality of the two instruments has rarely been brought out so beautifully. And you will never again be able to hear Clarke’s music without noticing at once the debt she owed to Debussy’s Faune, especially to that little falling-fourth pattern at rehearsal no. 4, which lurks in so many of Clarke’s lyrical second subjects. Even in a field awash in fine recordings, Silhouettes is truly special.

Silhouettes (Dana Zemtsov, viola / Anna Fedorova, piano). Includes Rebecca Clarke, Sonata for Viola and Piano; Debussy, La plus que lente, Clair de lune, Beau soir; Werkman, Suite for Viola and Piano; Milhaud, Sonata No. 1 for Viola and Piano, Op. 240; Enescu, Concert Piece for Viola and Piano. Channel Classics CD CCS 42320, 2020.