New Issues of Ravel Pavane for Viola and Piano and Smyth Bonny Sweet Robin at IMC

I worked very hard to maintain the original spirit, markings, and voicing that Maurice Ravel used in the 1899 piece he wrote for solo piano. It took a great deal of thought to make it work, and I am pleased with the "viola-ness" of the result.

Dame Ethel Smyth wrote a handful of chamber music pieces while she was in Germany but spent the bulk of her career in England writing large-scale works. She returned to chamber music in her late 60s, and her Variations on Bonny Sweet Robin for flute, oboe, and piano, which she completed in 1927, is one of her last works. Smyth’s hearing started to deteriorate during her 60s, and by her 75th birthday she had become completely deaf.

The popular sixteenth-century melody “Bonny Sweet Robin” is also known as “My Robin is to the Greenwood Gone.” Variations on it by Giles Farnaby and John Munday appear in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book. It is referred to as “Ophelia’s Song” because the character of Ophelia sings “for bonny sweet Robin is all my joy” during what Laertes calls her “document in madness” in Act 4, Scene 5 of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The text of the original song has been lost, but scholars believe “for bonny sweet Robin is all my joy” is the last line of “Bonny Sweet Robin.”

Johannes Brahms, who liked to characterize people as orchestral instruments, called Ethel Smyth “the oboe.” Whether it was because of her piercing personality or the pitch and resonance of her voice, we will never know. But we do know that Smyth chose to write this late piece for the oboe.

The precedent for substituting a violin or a viola for the oboe involves “Two Interlinked French Folk Melodies,” another piece set for flute, oboe, and piano that Smyth wrote around the same time. The first performance of that piece was given with a violinist playing the oboe part. This edition comes with violin and viola versions of the oboe part (which is why they asked me to edit it).

You can find the music by way of the International Music Company's New Issues page here.