Viola Works by Bax, Vaughan Williams, Holland – Chase

Roger Chase has spent a professional lifetime rescuing violists from the margins of the repertoire, and this Dutton disc — generous, intelligently planned, beautifully recorded in that warm BBC studio acoustic — amounts to a kind of position paper on what the instrument can do when English composers stop treating it as a consolation prize for failed violinists.

The Bax Phantasy has waited the better part of a century for decent company on disc. Rivka Golani got there first, back in 1989, in a rendition that always struck me as handsomely sung but curiously unmoored rhythmically, Bax’s rhapsodic sprawl taken at face value, as if the music simply meandered because the composer couldn’t help himself. Chase and Stephen Bell know better. They understand that Bax’s rhapsody is organized rhapsody, that underneath the purple harmonic haze there’s a tight dramatic argument working itself out. The opening gesture is gruff, almost insulted in tone, and it sets a mood of thwarted anger that Chase never loses track of even when the music drifts into those Szymanowski-scented reveries that Bax could not resist. (He’d absorbed Szymanowski’s Myths and never quite got over it; you can hear the debt in half his viola and violin writing from this period.) The martial episodes have real bite here, brass and timpani snarling without swamping the soloist, and the slow central span breathes with a kind of erotic hush that recalls nothing so much as the tone-painting of Tintagel, composed only a few years earlier and still rattling around Bax’s ear.

Lionel Tertis never recorded his dedication piece, more’s the pity. We’re left to imagine what his famous dark, covered tone might have made of this score, which asks for exactly the blend of virility and vulnerability his playing was celebrated for. Chase doesn’t attempt period ventriloquism. His sound is leaner, more athletic, the vibrato narrower than Golani’s plush, old-school wobble. I prefer it. The finale’s half-jig, half-quickstep has real swagger, a kind of tipsy bravado shot through with melancholy, and the final pages are dispatched with exactly the flourish Bax wrote into the part and that too many interpreters underplay out of misplaced reticence.

Theodore Holland is a name that means nothing to most listeners, including, I’d guess, most who think they know their English pastoral school cold. He taught John Joubert composition at the Academy; he was a friend of Bax’s there in the years before the first war. Ellingham Marshes, composed as Europe tore itself apart again, around 1940, is not the “swooningly fey” tone poem its title might suggest to the unwary. There’s real grit in the orchestration, a tartness in the woodwind writing that keeps sentimentality at bay even as the string lines stretch out toward the horizon in long unbroken paragraphs. It is a real discovery, this piece, not a masterpiece exactly, but a finely made one, deserving of better than eight decades of silence.

The Vaughan Williams Suite, by contrast, needs no advocacy from me or anyone. Composed for Tertis in the mid-1930s, it has six short, sharply characterized movements, by turns pungent (the “Polka mélancolique” earns its oxymoron) and heartbreakingly simple (the closing “Musette” is practically folk song transfigured). Chase’s reading has plenty of wit and point; the BBC Concert Orchestra’s lower strings dig in with real relish in the galumphing “Carol.” I missed, here and there, a touch of the sweetness that the finest exponents — Frederick Riddle among them, who gave the first performance — bring to the gentler movements. But this is a quibble against a performance of evident love and long familiarity.

Richard Harvey’s Reflections, closing the program and conducted by the composer himself, is the wild card. A 1990 piece revised in 2012, tonal and unapologetically lyrical, it owes something to film scoring (Harvey has written plenty of it) and something to minimalism’s patient harmonic rhythm. It doesn’t pretend to the weight of its disc-mates. But it’s expertly laid out for the instrument, and Chase plays it with the same conviction he brings to Bax, with no condescension toward the newer, lesser-known score.

Dutton’s engineering does everyone proud: the viola sits forward without ever sounding spotlit, the orchestra has real depth and air around it. This disc belongs on the shelf of anyone who thinks English music for viola begins and ends with Walton’s concerto. It doesn’t. It never did.