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Music
for Viola
Patricia
McCarty, Viola
Martha
Babcock, Cello
Peter
Hadcock, Clarinet
Virginia
Eskin,
Piano
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She billed herself
as "Viola Player and Composer" and for many
years was generally forgotten in both capacities. But
during the first two decades of this century, she was
acknowledged as one of the finest violists of the day
and a composer of rare distincition. She was greatly
esteemed for her playing in chamber music; her partners
included Schnabel, Casals, Thibaud, Artur Rubinstein,
Percy Grainger, Myra Hess, and George Szell. Rubinstein
called her "the glorious Rebecca Clarke."
Clarke was born
in Harrow, England, in 1886. Her father, an amateur
cellist who wanted to have chamber music on tap in the
family, supervised her early musical education. At the
age of eight, Clarke was sent to learn the violin and
soon was taking part in what she later called "horrible
attempts" on the string quartet literature, with
"Papa...in his glory, snorting and grunting over
the high notes in the cello part and telling us all
what we ought to do." Clarke's father also took
her to concerts in London, where she first heard the
Joachim Quartet and Eugene Ysaye, who became her idol.
In 1902, Clarke went to the Royal Academy of Music to
study the violin with Hans Wessely. The next year she
began to compose songs, mostly to German texts and all
heavily indebted to Brahms. After leaving the Royal
Academy in the middle of her third year when her harmony
teacher unexpectedly proposed marriage and her father
made her withdraw, Clarke found in composing "a
refuge, an outlet, and finally a passion" and began
to dream of becoming a professional musician.
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