Viola Sonata No.1 in C minor Op.18 (1905)

Having been described by no less an authority than Camille Saint-Saëns as “the most remarkable of the young British composers,” York Bowen should have had a brilliant career ahead of him. He was only 19 at the time, still a student of piano and composition at the Royal Academy of Music, and he had just played his First Piano Concerto at the Proms. He was to go on composing, prolifically, while sustaining parallel careers as pianist and teacher, for the next fifty years or so. Music was to undergo several revolutions during the first two or three decades of the 20th century, however, while his late-romantic style remained stubbornly unchanged – which effectively sidelined himself from the British mainstream for the rest of his life.

The two Viola Sonatas and the Viola Concerto were all written in the composer’s early twenties for Lionel Tertis, celebrated teacher at the RAM, who engaged him in his mission to change perceptions of the viola and enlarge its repertoire. A violist himself, who preferred the sound of the viola to that of the violin, Bowen wrote astonishingly well for the instrument from the start. The Sonata in C minor Op.18, which Tertis and Bowen first performed at the Aeolian Hall in 1905, is a big-boned romantic work at least as ambitious as the two Sonatas Op.120 completed by Brahms nine years earlier. Tertis called it “vivacious and light-hearted,” a description which certainly applies to the last movement but scarcely to the other two. The exception is the Grieg-like dance tune that functions as the closing theme of the exposition of the opening Allegro moderato but which is heard again only if the exposition is repeated. After the passionate climax of the movement, with its percussive piano dissonances, it would have been out of place.

In their context, only half-way through the first decade of the 20th century, Bowen’s harmonies are by no means unimaginative. A particularly effective modulation in the Poco lento brings about a magical change of mood at the start of the middle section, where the viola projects a new melody over swirling arabesques on the piano. Even in the tuneful (and again Griegish) Finale the contrastingly lyrical first episode moves on slippery chromatic harmonies and there are more keyboard dissonances in the declamatory passage that precedes the hectic coda.