Reviews
BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE MARCH 2009
“The performances excel. Roger Chase’s playing is remarkable . . ”
Stanley Bate – Concerto for Viola
Vaughan Williams - Romance
W.H. Bell – Rosa Mystica
The opening bars of Stanley Bate’s Viola Concerto are so impressive that you wonder why, until this recording, the work has remained unplayed since its premiere in America in 1947. Forty minutes later, the reasons are clear. There’s much that appeals strongly. The music’s affinity with Vaughan Williams is close, but deeper than merely derivative; and Bate’s command of the orchestra is total. What’s lacking is the sustained individuality promised by those opening bars. Prolix, compulsive fluency dominates: you find yourself yearning for the degree of focus which would have enabled Bate to do justice to such an exceptional talent.
William Henry Bell’s concerto Rosa Mystica explores wider musical territory, with serious orchestral mastery to match, although so many attractive ideas are thrown into the mix that they risk crowding each other out. Vaughan Williams’s Romance can’t help making the point that it says almost as much as either of its companion works here, in less than one-fifth their length. The performances excel. Roger Chase’s playing is remarkable for the keening intensity he draws from his viola’s upper register, plus the wonderful, tawny concentration of sonority lower down. And the BBC Concert Orchestra and Stephen Bell give the accompaniments their full value.
—Malcolm Hayes
Stanley Bate? – W. H. Bell?? OK so perhaps not necessarily the most familiar names in English music, but having now experienced and listened in awe to this amazing recording by Roger Chase – I cannot conceive of why these pieces are not absolutely and fully established in the main stream Viola Repertoire.
The thing is....this is such the most incredible and exhilarating playing – in fact surely some of the greatest viola playing ever!
Technically immaculate, as you would expect from Roger Chase, every note has incredible energy and life - especially the most impossibly difficult quick passages. The sonorous lower register is almost indescribably beautiful and draws you in from the very first note. Nothing is ever taken for granted, every phrase really matters and this gives structure and strength and a spine tingling sense that you are hearing the definitive sound of the Viola.
Stanley Bate, as Lewis Foreman writes in his excellent CD cover notes, was born in Plymouth in 1911. He studied composition at the Royal College of Music with Vaughan Williams and Gordon Jacob and later in Germany with Hindemith, himself a great composer for Viola, and in Paris with Nadia Boulanger. The concerto by Bate in, Rogers own admission “shockingly difficult” (although you would never guess this from his seemingly effortless playing) was premiered in New York in 1947 by Emanuel Vardi with the NBC Symphony Orchestra-but surprisingly has not been heard again until now.
This is truly a work of great genius-it has everything a great piece needs to make it to the big time. Fabulous melodic music, full blown brass chorales, and unbelievably difficult technical passages for the soloist - it has the lot. Surely this will now receive the attention and acclaim it truly deserves.
W.H. Bell, born in St. Albans in 1873, studied at the Royal Academy of Music with Frederick Corder and also at the Royal College of Music with Stanford.
Lewis Foreman writes - In 1912 at the age of 39 Bell accepted the post of Director of the South African College of Music in Cape Town, where for over 30 years he not only was a very successful teacher but also created a unique and substantial body of work still unknown by the wider public.
W.H. Bell’s stunningly beautiful piece ‘Rosa Mystica’ was first performed in Cape Town in 1917 but appears never to have been performed outside of South Africa and remained unpublished. It was recently rediscovered by Lewis Foreman and has been made ready for performance by Roger Chase and Michiko Otaki – Roger describes “the thrill of hearing the full Orchestra play this for the first time....the rebirth of a piece not heard for some 90 odd years”
The Vaughan Williams Romance is of course more well known but in its original form – Viola and Piano and written probably as an encore piece for Tertis in the 1930’s. It was edited by Bernard Shore, who gave its first performance in 1962. (Bernard Shore being Roger Chase’s teacher at the Royal College of Music.)
Here though, we have Roger Chase replacing the piano with his own very subtle and incredibly refined orchestration. Chase has scored this for a small band – strings, two flutes and clarinets and horn. The combination works so well that it already seems the Romance was originally written this way.
Let’s hope Roger puts pen to paper again soon – he obviously has much to offer.......
So! - This is a great deal of very fine music that is incredibly inspiring to any one even vaguely musical let alone Viola players! And yet there is still more.......
...A full CD in fact of Viola Music by the great English composer Benjamin Dale.
Suite for Viola and Piano
Introduction and Andante for six Violas - op 5
English Dance
Phantasy for Viola and Piano – op 4
Roger Chase is joined here by the pianist Michiko Otaki (and a whole bunch of former students for the Introduction and Andante for 6 Violas)
This is really astonishing chamber music – the pairing of Chase and Otaki is as though they are one – Chemistry or Synergy between them makes again for a definitive performance of these great pieces.
Benjamin James Dale was born in London in 1885 and, like Bell, studied at the Royal Academy of Music with Frederick Corder. As Lewis Forman describes, again in his brilliant CD cover notes. Dale was particularly noted for his music for Viola – Written under the pressing championship of Lionel Tertis.
The first two movements of the suite in their orchestral version were widely played by Tertis and he often played the middle movement of the suite, The Romance, as an encore piece. It was Tertis who commissioned the Introduction and Andante for a lecture recital at the Royal Academy of Music - performed by him and featuring his most outstanding Viola pupils. It is hardly possible here to try to fully credit just how much Lionel Tertis is the reason we all play the Viola. His influence on the instrument its players and its repertoire cannot ever be truly quantified.
Roger plays of course, on the Montagnana Viola that Tertis so loved and on which so many brand new Viola pieces were premiered and brought into being.
In these recordings Roger Chase has produced two CD’s of music which needs to be heard. If not the most familiar repertoire, this is without doubt some of the very finest I have come across to date.
This really is incredible stuff – I can’t recommend it highly enough.
—Ken Atkinson
BENJAMIN DALE Music for Viola
Roger Chase(Viola) and Michiko Otaki(Piano)
Dutton Epoch CDLX 7204
“Hats off, gentlemen – a Genius” were the words with which Robert Schumann famously introduced his readers to Fréderic Chopin. “Genius” is perhaps a bit strong in describing Benjamin Dale, but “a major talent” is, I guess, a justifiable term.
Born in 1885 to parents who were relatively well off, he showed early ability playing piano and organ – and indeed as a composer. In his teens he began studies at the Royal Academy of Music, where in 1902 he wrote a large-scale Piano Sonata. The successful première of this work and the excellent press reviews it received effectively launched Dale as a composer; overnight his reputation was established.
Any young composer at the Royal Academy a hundred years ago was likely to be enthusiastically pressed by Lionel Tertis to write for his beloved Viola! Tertis had recently been persuaded to take up the viola and urged composer friends to write viola works with the zeal of a convert. (It should be realized that a very restricted repertoire was known for the instrument.) Benjamin Dale responded by writing three fine viola works, his opus 2,4 and 5 , which have become recognized as his best compositions (together with that giant Piano Sonata.)
The Suite for Viola and Piano op.2, is another large-scale work, playing for nearly 35 minutes; a great Sonata in all but name. The first movement shows that Dale recognized Tertis’s stature as a true virtuoso, ranging over the instrument including the highest part of the A string, which was a largely unexplored region in the early 1900s! The central Romance has become known as a fine movement in its own right, as Tertis often performed it as a separate item. In the finale Dale sets up still greater challenges to a player’s abilities; to hear Tertis play it must have been an electrifying experience.
The Phantasy for Viola and Piano op.4 was commissioned by Walter Cobbett, the most significant amateur musician in British history. (It was said of Cobbett, who was a Liverpool lawyer, that he devoted as much time to his profession as he could spare from his Music!) As Cobbett, a keen violinist, liked to play chamber music in his lunch hour, his preference was for shorter works, so when he set up a competition for chamber compositions he chose to revive the form of the old English Fancy (or Phantasy.) Thus the works submitted were to be of modest length; a Phantasy might comprise three or four sections, but these were to be played without a break. Dale’s op.4 Phantasy plays for nearly 20 minutes and is in fact one of the most substantial examples of this form. As with the Suite major demands, both technical and musical, are made on the pianist as well as the viola player.
Dale’s op.5 is an Introduction and Andante for Six Violas. This was in response to a request from Tertis for a movement to play with his pupils. It is a compositional tour de force to write so effectively for six equal instruments; the sixth viola is directed to tune his C string down to Bflat to increase the range.
These three major works have recently been recorded on the Dutton Epoch label by Roger Chase and Michiko Otaki, together with a lighter English Dance, which has been arranged for viola and piano by York Bowen as a compliment to Dale, his good friend. (Bowen, also a fine pianist and composer, was a contemporary of Benjamin Dale at the Royal Academy.) It is particularly appropriate that Roger Chase should be the viola player on this CD as he plays on the great Montagnana viola that used to belong to Lionel Tertis. His pianist partner, Michiko Otaki, responds strongly to the challenges of Dale’s keyboard writing and brings her own sense of timing and drama to these excellent performances.
Quite apart from the appropriate circumstance of playing on the same viola as Tertis, Roger Chase adds to a sense of authority and technical command a rare degree of musical commitment and great warmth of tone.
If there is better viola playing to be heard anywhere in the world today I don’t know of it!
In the op.5 Sextet Roger Chase is joined by five of his former students, who give a totally convincing account of this unique music. This, of course, fulfils the circumstances of the first performance in 1911, when Tertis played it with his students! Benjamin Dale’s viola compositions embody a full hearted Edwardian Romantic style as well as being written with great skill and immaculate detail. This is music to warm a viola lover’s heart!
—Christopher Wellington, February 2009