Low Voice, Viola and Piano: It’s No Coincidence!

Mark Walder - It’s no coincidence that the wonderful, heavenly-sounding and highly expressive chamber music combination of low voice, viola and piano, as featured in Two Songs Op. 91 by Johannes Brahms (1833-1897), is well known to regular chamber music participants. Happily, there is a new addition to the repertoire.
 

Three Songs From Dawn to Noon, for Low Voice, Viola and Piano, composed by Austin Boothroyd (1959), was written in July last year as new repertoire both for the concert hall and for chamber music gatherings. It was written in the first instance for informal music making, for the singing teacher and choir director Anja Schlenker-Rapke (alto voice), the musician and teacher Sarah Boothroyd (viola), and the composer and pianist Austin Boothroyd.

The words of Three Songs From Dawn to Noon are by the English poet, writer and ambassadress Lady Mary Montgomerie Currie, who wrote using the pseudonym Violet Fane (1843-1905). She was well-known in the British literary scene of the late nineteenth century, rubbing shoulders, among others, with Robert Browning, Algernon Swinburne, Lillie Langtry and Oscar Wilde. Her seminal collection of poetry, From Dawn to Noon (1872), comprises 60 poems organised into two sections, Dawn and Noon. The three poems selected for the songs explore the theme of love, especially love lost, and are framed, in this musical setting, in those early waking moments of the dawn.
 

The initial inspiration to explore the poetry of Violet Fane came from the personal discovery that Violet had grown up in the south east of England, close to the composer’s home in Eastbourne. The well-know phrase or proverb, “all things come to those who wait”, is attributed to the poet and first appeared in her poem Tout vient a qui sait attendre.

The music of Three Songs conveys in its lyricism the dreaminess of the world between sleep and wakefulness. The first and last songs share material framing the middle song, and dialogue between the voice and viola characterises the song cycle as a whole. Indeed, the viola can be said to take on the persona of the character portrayed in the songs. Passing time is suggested in the piano figuration of the first and last songs, while a rhapsodic mood is introduced by the piano in the central song.

Coincidentally, unknown to Austin Boothroyd, the publisher, Hansruedi Gräf, was also interest in this combination of low voice, viola and piano. While the publisher was engaged in the extensive task of publishing the viola works of Alexander Presuhn (1870-1950), including his Liederzyklus mit Texten von

Maria Lutz-Weitmann for alto voice, viola and piano (1929), the composer was already at work on Three Songs. Alexander Presuhn’s works featuring viola are gradually appearing in print and in downloadable pdfs under Hansruedi Gräf’s ViolaViva and Music4Viola labels. The editor of this project is Gerhardt Löffler, the great-grandson of Alexander Presuhn.
 

And here we have yet another coincidence, and surprise this summer for Austin Boothroyd: Gerhardt Löffler and the singing teacher and choir director Anya Schlenker-Rapke were already acquainted! Gerhard and Anja had in fact met as participants to perform all the songs from Presuhn’s Liederzyklus at the Freie Waldorfschule in Karlsruhe on 3^rd March 2018. At the performance, given from his great-grandfather’s manuscript copies by Trio Esterelle, Gerhardt Löffler gave a spoken ​

​ introduction while Anja (alto voice) joined with the other members of Trio Estetelle, Gaiva Bražénaité-Gaber (viola) and Cornelia Gengenbach (piano), to perform the songs. The programme of course featured music by other composers for this well-known, heavenly-sounding and highly expressive combination of low voice, viola and piano.

I very much hope singers, violists and pianists enjoy performing Three Songs From Dawn to Noon. They can be paired with Brahms’s chamber music classic Op. 91, or with song settings for low or medium voice, viola and piano by other composers, for example Quatre Poèmes Op. 5 by Charles Martin Loeffler (1861-1935), Three Songs by Frank Bridge (1879-1941) or Liederzyklus mit Texten von Maria Lutz-Weitmann by Alexander Presuhn. The latter songs are published separately by Music4Viola (M4V-1006, 1007, 1012, 1013, 1014 &c.).

Three Songs From Dawn to Noon is published this year by ViolaViva (VV 332).