The composers on this album — York Bowen, Benjamin Dale, and Frank Bridge — belong to a generation of musicians who ushered in a new period blending Late Romanticism with Classical Modernism in London around the turn of the 20th century.
Performer Biography
Yuki Inagawa, the pianist on this album, received her first piano lessons at age six in Sapporo, Japan, and later studied at the Toho Gakuen Academy of Music in Tokyo and the Hanns Eisler University of Music in Berlin.
Historical Context
The increased attention given to the viola in the early 20th century was partly due to Lionel Tertis (1876-1975), the first violist to achieve international fame as a soloist, making it desirable for composers to dedicate works to him.
Performer Biography
Gernot Adrion, the violist on this album, has been the Assistant Principal Viola in the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra since 1996 and has won several national competitions.
Composer's Artistic Vision
All three composers on this album shared a particular fondness for the viola's dark and melancholy timbre, seeing it as a musical reflection of the fin-de-siècle mood prevalent among artists and intellectuals.
Composition History
Walter Willson Cobbett, a wealthy benefactor and amateur violinist, inaugurated an annual series of chamber music competitions in 1905 to revive the Elizabethan fantasy artform, requiring single-movement works with multiple sections that treated sonata form freely.
