About this Piece

An immensely accomplished and popular pianist as well as a composer, York Bowen was a mainstay of British concert life in the first half of the 20th century. In addition to appearing at all the leading concert venues in his native England, Bowen also was an enthusiastic advocate and participant in the new technologies of radio broadcasts and recordings. (In 1925 he made the first recording of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto.)

One of Bowen’s most important musical friendships and collaborations was with the violist Lionel Tertis, a colleague of Bowen’s at the Royal Academy of Music. Bowen played the viola himself, preferring its tonal palette to that of the violin, and he composed a concerto, two sonatas, and a number of shorter pieces for Tertis and often performed in recital with the violist.

Bowen wrote this Fantasia for Four Violas in 1907 for Tertis to play with his protégés. Bowen himself was transitioning from student to master at the time, winning a fellowship to the Royal Academy of Music that year. He would become a professor of piano there just two years later and remained on the faculty until his death at age 77.

The conventional narrative on Bowen’s compositions is that he peaked early and never evolved, becoming increasingly irrelevant across an era of radical stylistic change. A more appreciative spin would be that the early peak was high indeed—as this Fantasia indicates—and he only intensified his idiosyncratic personal esthetic rather than chase musical trends.

Though written for a master and students, the Fantasia is fully interactive, an episodic conversation among peers rather than a lecture. Bowen wrote a number of chamber works with some form of the word “fantasy” in the title, responding to the annual competitions that the music patron Walter Willson Cobbett funded for “Phantasy” pieces. (Bowen won the prize in 1918 for his Fantasy for Viola and Piano, another work written for Tertis.)

The “fantasy” rubric allowed Bowen to indulge his penchant for multi-sectional works in an arch form. He varies textures throughout and exploits the viola’s characterful voice over its full range. There is urgent energy at the center of this arch, but the piece begins and ends in somber reflection; the fey spacing of the chords at the close is Bowen at his most distinctive. —J.H.