Review: A Celebration of Lionel Tertis
Timothy Ridout (viola) and James Baillieu (piano) at Hartlepool Town Hall Theatre
The attention of the viola world, niche and rarefied though it might be, has been focused on Gateshead this week, where some of the world’s best players are performing and competing.
On Tuesday, though, attention shifted for a couple of hours to Hartlepool where Lionel Tertis, the greatest 20th Century champion of the instrument, was born on December 29, 1876.
Viola player Timothy Ridout and piano accompanist James Baillieu gave a lunchtime concert, introduced by Prof Louise Lansdown, viola player, teacher and chief artistic director of the Tertis and Aronovitz international viola competitions that are being contested for the first time at The Glasshouse International Centre for Music (in past years the Isle of Man has been the venue).
Once on stage they were straight into the music, Timothy (a much garlanded past winner of the Tertis competition) with his 1575 vintage viola and James at the grand piano hired in for the occasion.
It was a charming concert which amply demonstrated the mellow beauty of the instrument Tertis loved while doing little to dispel the air of appealing eccentricity that seems to have long surrounded it.
Louise Lansdown described Tertis’s second autobiography, My Viola and I, written in the early 1970s when he “discovered he was still alive”, as “a hilarious and eccentric read”.
His first, which he called Cinderella No More, came out in 1953 and is long out of print and hard to find.
The title acknowledged the status of the instrument before Tertis got to work. Even now, said Timothy Ridout, it was often regarded as “the unfortunate sibling of the violin and cello”.
Afterwards he told me that he’d picked it at school after the class music teacher demonstrated various stringed instruments and, for the viola, played a snatch of the Harry Potter theme music.
“I’ll play that one,” said Timothy’s eight-year-old self in a snap decision, and the seed of a fantastic career was sown.
Tertis, he explained on stage, significantly raised its status, composing, commissioning and arranging a huge repertoire for viola and giving recitals around the world.
“He was really a force of nature. He lived for 99 years and achieved a hell of a lot.”
The concert opened with the unaccompanied ‘Chaconne’ from Bach’s Partita No. 2 in D minor which was composed for violin but arranged by Tertis for viola who got in with a recording ahead of any violinist.
Among other pieces, we also heard a short Tertis composition, Hier au Soir (Yesterday in the Evening), and the first movement of Brahms’ Sonata in E flat for viola and piano, which Tertis apparently played a lot.
Timothy Ridout is a wonderful musician, making the process look easy yet also giving the impression, if you were to close your eyes, that you’re hearing not just one stringed instrument but an ensemble.
There were two encores, the musicians evidently feeling at home amid the late Victorian and ever so slightly faded grandeur of Hartlepool Town Hall Theatre (designed by Henry Cheers, I was pleased to see).
First came Praeludium and Allegro by the Austrian violinist Fritz Kreizler, whom Tertis much admired and whose compositions he arranged for viola, and finally a beautifully melancholic piece by Eric Coates called First Meeting (Souvenir) which he composed during the Second World War to mark his son’s 21st birthday and for Tertis to play.
It appears the relocating of the two viola competitions to the North East and the discovery – or rediscovery – of Hartlepool being Tertis’s birthplace by local historian Eric Wilson were a fortunate coincidence.
It is certainly true that Lionel Tertis did not reside long in the town, his family relocating to London when he was a baby.
But Hartlepool Borough Council isn’t minded to let go of its celebrated son.
Councillor Phil Holbrook, noting that next year will be the 150th anniversary of his birth, said plans were being laid for a repeat concert.
Meanwhile council leader Brenda Harrison said one of the financial awards given to budding young musicians via the Preston Simpson and Sterndale Young Musicians Trust would in future be named after Lionel Tertis, “so that we keep his memory embedded in the musical culture in Hartlepool”.
Louise Lansdown finished by directing us to YouTube where we could find a documentary series, Cinderella No More: The English Viola Legacy, which she had made with Timothy and James in 2020 at the home of Sir Benjamin Britten in Aldeburgh, Suffolk.