Nicholas Cords: Touch Harmonious
In A Circle Records

The title of violist Nicholas Cords' new release derives from an eighteenth-century epitaph written by Samuel Johnson for musician Claude Philips, but his avowed “touch harmonious” might just as easily be said to apply to Cords himself. The long-time member of Brooklyn Rider and the Silkroad Ensemble can play with the sweetest of tone but also with a raw edge when the music calls for it. The centuries-spanning array of material performed on his follow-up to 2013's Recursions allows for the expression of the violist's many sides, from lyrical rhapsody to plaintive longing. Extending from Johann Sebastian Bach and Benjamin Britten to living composers Anna Clyne, Dmitri Yanov-Yanovski, and Dana Lyn, the set-list reflects Cords' engagement with music of multiple eras. Yet however large the temporal expanse in play, a continuum can be discerned from the early works to the later ones, especially when the latter draw for inspiration from the Baroque period.

Placed in context, Cords recorded the album between December 2019 and July 2020, with much of it completed as the COVID-19 pandemic placed a stranglehold on our lives. If Touch Harmonious isn't a panacea, it's at the very least a balm for those experiencing longing for earlier days. Don't interpret that to mean, however, that the music is singularly elegiac; there are moments of levity and even joy, the nine wide-ranging movements of the Britten work alone proof enough of that. It's the kind of solo recording where the particular sound of the instrument is so integral to the music's impact, Cords' inclusion of details relating to the instrument—the viola originating in Angers, France in 2019 and the bow in Paris around 1860—registers as info relevant to a full appreciation of the album.

One's drawn into the recording immediately by a prelude from the Baroque era by Carl Friedrich Abel, with Cords' playing growing ever more entrancing as the wave-like patterns build in intensity. Indicative of the contemporary material's connection to the past, Clyne's “Rest These Hands” (from the larger work The Violin, written in 2014) includes a reference to Bach's Violin Sonata in G minor, BWV 1001; what leaves a greater lasting impression, however, is the mournfulness of the material's melismatic lament, a quality perhaps attributable to the fact that the title comes from a poem her mother wrote in the final year of her life; never more explicitly is the vocal-like character of the viola more obvious than during the piece's closing minutes. Written for Cords in 2017, Yanov-Yanovski's Short Epitaph likewise reveals a tie to the past in using as a base a progression thought to have been born in the Renaissance though popularized in Baroque times. Noteworthy here is the fact that Cords doubles himself to bring the arrangement for two violas into being. Perpetuating the theme, echoes of Bach emerge within Lyn's endlessly i would have walked, which also was composed for the violist in 2017.

Both the Bach and Britten pieces were originally composed for cello and have thus been adapted for viola. Up first, the latter's monumental Cello Suite No. 3 from 1971 has been covered by many a cellist but sounds veritably reborn in this arrangement by Nobuko Imai. Originally dedicated to Mstislav Rostropovich, Britten integrated three Russian songs and the Russian Orthodox Kontakion into its presentation, the result a work of immense emotional breadth. Elegiac movements such as the third (“Canto”) and the solemn ninth with its magnificent resolution (“Passacaglia”) naturally make a powerful impression, but the lyrical fourth (“Barcarola”) and serpentine eighth (“Moto Perpetuo”) rival them for impact. From the beguiling “Prelude” and graceful “Allemande” to the folk dance-like “Courante,” Bach's six-part Cello Suite No.1 in G Major proves as enchanting in this adaptation as in its original form. Touch Harmonious ends stirringly with an arrangement by Japanese composer Toshio Hosokawa of the poignant aria “Lascia ch'io pianga” from Handel's Rinaldo.

January 2021