There is something quietly radical about a viola recital that doesn’t apologize for itself. Maxim Rysanov and Ashley Wass have assembled a program that treats the instrument not as a cello manqué or a violin with ambitions it can’t quite fulfill, but as an entity with its own particular gravity — suited by temperament, by timbre, to music that lives in shadow and mist.
The Ravel opener sets the terms immediately. “Pavane pour une infante défunte” was written for piano in 1899, a student piece that outlived most of Ravel’s more ambitious early efforts, and it transfers to the viola with uncanny naturalness. Rysanov plays it with the patience the piece demands — this is music that resists hurrying, resists any tendency to lean into sentiment. The middle voice is its natural home, one suspects.
Then Fauré. Three works, distributed across the program rather than massed together, which is a shrewd decision — it lets the music breathe, lets the listener hear each piece fresh rather than through accumulated fatigue. “Après un rêve” is one of those songs so perfect in its original form that any transcription invites skepticism. Here it earns its place. Rysanov finds the long, aching line without thickening it into self-pity, and Wass — consistently Rysanov’s genuine equal in this partnership, never merely accompanying — shapes the harmonic progressions with the kind of understated intelligence that only becomes fully visible when it’s absent.
The Élégie, op. 24, is a different proposition entirely. Fauré wrote it in 1880, originally for cello, and it carries more weight than the songs — a darker gravity, a sense of mourning that is specific rather than atmospheric. On the viola, the lower register takes on additional resonance, something almost funereal in the best sense. Rysanov doesn’t overplay it. He lets the melodic line tell its own story, trusting the architecture.
Richard Dubugnon is the wild card here, and a genuine one. Born in 1968, Swiss, trained in Paris and London, he’s a composer who moves comfortably between worlds — tonal and post-tonal, lyrical and disruptive. His Incantatio, op. 12b, runs to fifteen minutes and constitutes the program’s center of gravity, structural and psychological. It’s demanding music, music that requires the listener to follow it rather than settle back. Rysanov plays it with total commitment — the technical precision is evident, but more than that, there’s a quality of advocacy that suggests genuine belief in the piece. Whether Incantatio will prove to be repertoire that lasts is genuinely hard to say. What’s clear is that it deserves to be heard on terms like these.
Clair de lune. Everybody knows it. Debussy wrote it for piano — the third movement of the Suite bergamasque, though he never called it that in conversation, and the title was borrowed from Verlaine. On the viola it risks becoming merely pretty, a tone-poem drained of its architectural interest. Rysanov avoids the trap, finding rhythmic structure beneath the impressionist surface. “La fille aux cheveux de lin” follows later in the program — shorter, less ambitious, but perfectly proportioned. Both Debussy pieces feel earned rather than decorative.
Dubugnon’s “Lied,” op. 44b — the later work — offers a kind of lyric counterweight to Incantatio‘s complexity. More transparent, more directly expressive. It fits neatly into the program’s emotional logic.
The Fauré Pavane, op. 50 — the famous one, originally for orchestra and chorus — closes the recital. It’s a risk to end here, with music this well-known, this beloved. But it works. The viola’s particular ache in the upper register gives the melody something it doesn’t always find in orchestral performances — intimacy, an almost confessional quality. Rysanov and Wass together take the music at a tempo that breathes, that allows the harmonies to register fully.
Recorded at Potton Hall in Suffolk in December 2011, the sound is close and warm without being airless. The balance between viola and piano is outstanding — this is a hall that has served chamber recordings well for years.
Not every track here is essential. The Debussy pieces, lovely as they are, feel slightly incidental — pleasant way-stations between the Fauré and Dubugnon, but not quite revelations. And the program as a whole asks you to accept some fairly familiar material alongside genuinely new challenges, which is both its strength and a mild limitation.
But Rysanov is a player of real distinction, and this recital confirms it. The viola has never had an easy time claiming concert-hall authority. Here it earns every minute.
