For some years now I have been a regular attendee at concerts by the estimable Nash Ensemble, chamber ensemble in residence at London’s Wigmore Hall; their themed seasons of programmes are consistently intelligent, wide-ranging and illuminating, the level of musicianship dependably excellent. At one such concert, in November 2018, I was intrigued to see, sitting there alongside Ian Conway, Benjamin Nabarro and Adrian Brendel in a performance of Brahms’ First Piano Quartet, a violist who seemed to be barely out of his teens. (He was, in fact, probably 22 at the time.) In that august company he effortlessly held his own, and when he kept turning up in the Ensemble’s ‘German Romantics’ season, I was repeatedly impressed, and decided to keep an eye out for the name Timothy Ridout.
Actually, I was a little late to the game: Ridout had made his debut at the Wigmore back in March 2017, having won first prize the previous year in the Lionel Tertis International Viola Competition. Still, better late then never. Since those first encounters with Ridout and his viola, I have usually seen him perform three or four times a year, often with acclaimed young artists like Benjamin Grosvenor, Hyeyoon Park and Kian Soltani, but also with established older figures like Steven Isserlis, Isabelle Faust, Jeremy Denk, Michael Collins, Nicholas Daniel, Christian Gerhaher, and Christian and Tanja Tetzlaff. If colleagues of such esteem and expertise are evidently very happy for Ridout to join them on stage, who am I to argue with their judgement?
But one doesn’t need to be a musician to realise that Ridout’s is a very special talent. His technical skill appears to be such that he can play anything and – given his assured and subtle control of tone, tempo and dynamics – make it sound wonderful. Notoriously, the viola is something of a neglected instrument compared to the violin and cello, yet it has its own particular range, strengths and repertoire, and Ridout is clearly committed to exploring and proving its potential. Only last October I attended a solo recital at the Wigmore, in which he played music by composers as different as Telemann, Bach, Britten, György Kurtág, Sally Beamish and Caroline Shaw. I confess that before the concert I did wonder how wise I’d been to buy a ticket for around 90 minutes of solo viola, but minutes after the first piece began, I knew I’d done the right thing. Indeed, the recital was one of the best concerts I attended last year. (That said, two quartet performances he’d participated in – taking in Robert Schumann, Brahms, Fauré and Frank Bridge – also featured in my top 25.)
More recently – yesterday, to be exact – I attended a Wigmore concert in which Ridout and the German pianist Frank Dupree performed two fine viola sonatas by Rebecca Clarke and York Bowen, and pieces by Enescu, Fauré, Kreisler and – as an encore – Eric Coates(!). The skill, energy, precision, passion and sheer beauty of the playing throughout met with a remarkably warm and enthusiastic response from the audience – and deservingly so. Each time I see Ridout perform I’m more persuaded than ever, just five years or so after I first heard him at the Wigmore, that he has become one of the most impressive young musicians around, and belongs up there alongside the likes of Kim Kashkashian, Tabea Zimmerman, Lawrence Power and Antoine Tamestit as one of today’s supreme exponents of the viola. (As it happens, Zimmerman and Power were two of his teachers at the Kronberg Academy.)
If you’d like to sample Ridout’s playing for yourself, there are plenty of examples on YouTube, including one with Dupree at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, which I think offers the same programme I just mentioned; you can also find a couple of concerts filmed at the Wigmore before I’d even heard of him. Then, of course, there are also his albums. Not that many as yet – give him time! – but his last, which includes Lionel Tertis’s arrangement for viola of Elgar’s Cello Concerto – won the Gramophone award for best concerto recording; no great surprise as it is rather wonderful. And then, just out now on Harmonia Mundi, is the double CD A Lionel Tertis Celebration, with Dupree on piano on one disc, and the likewise admirable James Baillieu on the other. Tertis was not only a great violist but someone who raised the instrument’s profile by commissioning many works for the instrument and by making arrangements of music written for other instrumentation. So in addition to the mostly glorious music performed with Dupree at the Wigmore last night, the album includes pieces by Robert Schumann, Brahms, Bridge, Vaughan Williams and others. (Here is the Kreisler piece). I bought it at the end of the concert so have only listened to it twice so far, but judging from those first hearings, I imagine I’ll be playing it pretty frequently…
Finally, just in case the viola really isn’t your thing (though I imagine you are at least curious, if you’ve read this far!), there are two other recent releases I’ve purchased which I can recommend to those who enjoy solo piano, both by terrific pianists. First, Igor Levit has recorded – in response to the Hamas attack of 7 October – Lieder ohne Worte, a selection of Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words, followed by Alkan’s Song of the Mad Woman on the Sea Shore; all proceeds from the recording go to two Berlin organisations dealing with anti-semitism. The programme is thoughtful, the playing unfussy, lovely, sensitive, and quietly expressive. Here is one of the Mendelssohn pieces.
Then there is Variation(s) 2, the second double CD in Cédric Tiberghien’s fascinating on-going project which mixes Beethoven’s many sets of variations with other examples of the form composed before or after Beethoven. The first compilation, released last year and repeatedly played, partnered the Eroica variations and several other sets with music by Mozart, Robert Schumann and Webern; the new album, still more imaginative, alternates the Beethoven sets with pieces by JS Bach, Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck (1562-1621) – I hadn’t heard of him either, but the Six Variations on ‘Mein junges Leben hat ein End’ are a very welcome inclusion – Cage, Crumb and Feldman. This isn’t Beethoven’s greatest music for piano, obviously (we haven’t reached the Diabelli Variations yet), but it is very enjoyable and very indicative of his enormous capacity for invention. Moreover, besides the nuanced, subtly coloured playing, these albums reward through unexpected but revealing juxtapositions, making for fascinating discoveries as well as pure pleasure. If you’d like to see Tiberghien mixing Beethoven with those American modernists at a Wigmore Hall concert I attended just before Covid hit in February 2020, you can watch it here.
You can find out more about Timothy Ridout at https://www.timothyridout.com. Elgar Viola Concerto and A Lionel Tertis Celebration are released by Harmonia Mundi. Igor Levit’s Lieder ohne Worte is released by Sony, Cédric Tiberghien’s Variation(s) albums by Harmonia Mundi. All photographs by the author; the one at top was taken at the Wigmore Hall solo recital on 27/10/23.
notes and observations by Geoff Andrew 