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Timothy Ridout: A Lionel Tertis Celebration album review – a glowing, sensitive tribute to a viola champion

Anyone who loves fine string playing will be delighted

Born in 1876 (on the same day as the great cellist Pablo Casals), Tertis became a champion of what at the beginning of his career was an overlooked and maligned instrument; through the brilliance of his playing, with its utterly distinctive vibrato influenced by hearing the violinist Fritz Kreisler, and in the wealth of music that he commissioned, the viola finally achieved status as a solo instrument in its own right. Both are played with wonderful sensitivity and effortlessly glowing tone by Ridout, but he and his colleagues lavish just as much attention and care on the 15 smaller-scale works with which they complete the discs. Some seem to me a bit questionable – I’m not convinced by the viola obbligato that Bowen adds to the first movement of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, for instance – but others, like Tertis’s own transcription of Fauré’s Élégie, usually heard as a cello piece, are a pure delight.

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