Lament for Two Violas
Frank Bridge

- Born February 26, 1879, in Brighton, England
- Died January 10, 1941, in Eastbourne, England
- Composed in 1912
- First CMS performance on January 14, 2016, by violists Paul Neubauer and Richard O’Neill
- Duration: 8 minutes

A squad of two violas is a special, rarely-heard sound. It can be found for short passages in many Romantic and 20th-century string sextets and so-called ‘viola’ quintets, in which the two, middle voices will stand out of the texture. But true viola duets are rarer than works for two cellos, or two violins, or even two double basses (whose general lack of repertoire has perhaps led to a swelled sense of solidarity).

Lionel Tertis, one of the first internationally touring viola soloists, was born in England in 1876. By 1900 he was a professor at the Royal Academy of Music and actively encouraging students, colleagues, and friends to write new works for the instrument. When a concert was planned in 1912 for him to perform at London’s Aeolian Hall with the young composer and fellow violist Frank Bridge, Bridge wrote a Lament and also a Caprice for the two to perform together. Neither was published, but the Lament has been reconstructed for performance from sketches in Bridge’s archive.

In this piece, the two violas swim in and out of one another’s rich tone. The two instruments are often playing two notes each, with the effect that it sounds like a viola choir is singing a mourning chorus. In these passages, the density of the chromatic counterpoint mixes with the inherently thick sound of the violas to produce a gripping, guttural buzz. At other moments, one viola soars above the other, singing a longing dirge while the other continues the harmonic support in tense, resonant double stops. In a central passage, the two violas trade tune and accompaniment almost every bar, locking into one another’s sound and becoming a single, husky instrument. When the piece opens up at the end, and the two instruments split the possible range of the ensemble cleanly into high and low, it creates a striking release of textural tension.

In this expressive use of orchestration, we hear a condensation of the melancholic style Bridge advanced throughout his career. There are notes of the bucolic nostalgia we find in his early works like 3 Idylls for String Quartet, which his student Benjamin Britten would later use as a basis for a towering homage, Variations on a Theme by Frank Bridge. And we might hear this two-viola Lament as an expressive preparatory exercise for Bridge’s later Lament for strings, which expressed some of his sorrow at the sinking of the British ship Lusitania in World War I.

Cellist, writer, and music researcher Nicky Swett is a PhD candidate and Gates Scholar at the University of Cambridge.