Timothy Mcgowen

Timothy Ridout gives us the opportunity to discover the splendid viola version of Elgar’s famous Cello Concerto – an arrangement approved by the composer, who conducted its premiere in 1930. In addition to this deeply moving work, he gives us a powerful, poetic reading of Bloch’s all too rarely performed Suite for Viola and Orchestra, in which the Swiss composer indulged his fascination with the Orient.

This well-planned Naxos programme is carefully laid out in two parts, each of viol music interspersed with harpsichord and organ pieces and ending with an anthem. It gives collectors an admirable opportunity to sample, very inexpensively, the wider output of Thomas Tomkins, and outstandingly fine Elizabethan musician whose music is still too known. Though he is best known for hid magnificent church music, it is refreshing to discover what he could do with viols, experimenting with different combinations of sizes of instruments, usually writing with the polyphony subservient to expressive harmonic feeling, as in the splendid and touching Fantasia for six viols. Perhaps the most remarkable piece here is the Hexachord fantasia, where the scurrying part-writing ornaments a rising and falling six-note scale (hexachord). The two five-part verse anthems and Above the stars, which is in six parts, are accompanied by five viols, with a fine counter-tenor in Above the stars and a bass in Thou art my King.

The Doric String Quartet is firmly established as one of the leading quartets of its generation, receiving enthusiastic responses from audiences and critics around the globe. Following their acclaimed recordings of Mendelssohn’s string quartets, here the quartet is joined by leading violist Timothy Ridout for an album of Mendelssohn’s two string quintets. These were written at the beginning and end of his short but remarkable compositional life. Mendelssohn composed No. 1 in 1826, shortly before the Overture to A Midsummer Night's Dream, when he was just seventeen. No. 2 was written in 1845, when he was thirty-six, a year before the première of Elijah and just two years before his death.