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Price: $24.95 |
The self-styled "viola player and composer" Rebecca Clarke (b. Harrow, England, 1886; d. New York City, 1979) played violin until her composition teacher, Sir Charles Stanford, urged her to shift over to the viola because then she would be in "right the middle of the sound, and can tell how it's all done." The viola became the basis of Clarke's world-wide career as a soloist and as a partner in chamber music with many of the greatest artists of the early twentieth century, including Schnabel, Casals, Thibaud, Rubinstein, Grainger, Hess, and Szell. Clarke's compositional output was brilliant out of all proportion to its bulk (about 90 works, including juvenilia). Her Viola Sonata and Piano Trio are often played and recorded, and are now generally regarded as masterpieces. Her mature songs (Boosey & Hawkes, repr. 1994; OUP, 2001) - perhaps her finest body of work, running the gamut from Blakean simplicity to brutal tragedy to outright farce-are also widely performed and recorded. Her choral and vocal-ensemble music were virtually unknown until publication of her Ave Maria and Chorus from Shelley's Hellas' (OUP, 1998 and 1999, respectively), but have since been recorded. OUP published her complete choral works in 2003. Several of her shorter instrumental chamber pieces, especially Morpheus (OUP, 2002) and the Prelude, Allegro, and Pastorale (OUP, 2000), have been performed, recorded, and broadcast worldwide. The front cover and title page reproduce a studio portrait of Clarke from the 1940s. The back cover reproduces notes on Brahms from Clarke's prompt-book for her lecture "What Is There in This Chamber Music?" (c. 1950), and two pages from Clarke's manuscript violin part for Dumka, showing the principal variants at the end of the cadenza.
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