Brighton Year-Round 2025
St Nicholas Yohei Nakajima, Miho Sanou Viola/Piano Recital
Yohel Nakajima, Miho Sanou

Genre: Live Music, Music
Venue: Yohel Nakajima, Miho Sanou
Festival: Brighton Year-Round
Low Down
Yohei Nakajima and Miho Sanou gave a Viola and Piano recital of Vaughan Williams, Frank Bridge and York Bowen.
A terrific, indeed unique opener to 2025 concerts here.
Review
Yohei Nakajima and Miho Sanou gave a Viola and Piano recital of pieces of Vaughan Williams and Frank Bridge, and the Viola Sonata No. 2 of York Bowen. Japanese musicians who completed their training in the UK (Nakajima at Trinity College, Sanou at the Royal Academy of Music), garnering several first prizes, they give an all-British programme.
Partly due to violist Lionel Tertis, the British viola tradition is possibly the greatest in the world. It wasn’t just Tertis, who commissioned or otherwise inspired so many viola works. Rebecca Clarke (1886-1979) whose own Viola Sonata has claim to be the finest ever, was another great viola player; as was the major composer Frank Bridge (1879-1941).
The wonder is that Bridge never wrote a Viola Sonata of his own. There’s pieces, but his greatest viola inspiration was perhaps to his pupil Benjamin Britten whose viola works are crowned by his Lachrimaye, both for viola and piano and at the end of his life, a version accompanied by string orchestra.
But Bridge’s two pieces here are like the second and first movements of a Sonata respectively. A Pensiero from around 1906 is in his early RCM Stanford-taught salon manner: wistful, pungent, quite memorable. The Allegro Appassionata of 1907-08 is surely the first movement to an unfinished Sonata, which could be completed with any number of rondo-finale pieces for various instruments Bridge composed. Published as a stand-alone in 1908 alongside the Pensiero, Bridge seems to have decided against.
This is big-boned, melodically indelible, in Bridge’s early manner: but bolder, full of Edwardian thrust though with a sweetness that reins in the Elgarian braggadocio. This kins it to late romanticism on one side French, on the other, Strauss. Nakajima enjoys this, and the peculiar power of his viola-playing (more on that in a moment) is accompanied in a full-blooded but always sensitive way by Sanou.
These pieces are also full of that rhapsodic optimism that’s the flipside to melancholy, which some British composers embodied: Elgar above all, but in certain moods Holst, Coleridge-Taylor, Bridge, Foulds, Bowen and also in more advanced idiom Bliss and Howells. It vanished after World War One.
Bridge himself would develop far more radically, ending nearer the Second Viennese School, in which style his later Violin Sonata of 1932 was written. It’s intensely sad he didn’t feel confident enough in his own interpretive allure to premiere a large-scale work on his own instrument: for Tertis would never have premiered anything of his after 1914.
Nakajima trained with the great violist Rivka Golani. Like her he plays a singular, rare Hungarian ’cutaway model’ by Otto Erdesz, with an angular cutaway on one side of the body and an asymmetric shape. It gives a grainy, singular nasal sound: penetrating and eerie. But it’s deeply rewarding too. Doubtless Golvani inspired some of the British repertoire here: she’s recorded some of it. Sanou studied with several teachers, the most recognized being Josef Stompel.
Vaughan Williams’ Romance is a slighter affair, dating from around 1914, so his early maturity (he was already nearing 42, like most British composers of the day, developing late). But it was never premiered till three years after his death in 1961 by violist Bernard Shore, when it was published too.
It opens with the familiar pentatonic murmurings you’d expect. The modal harmonies are there, the faint harking-back to the world of Taverner, Tye, Tallis above all, Shepherd and Byrd. False relations and the contnenance anglaise inflect it, as it does most of VW. After some anguish and agitation it settles back to a provisional peace. Prophetic.
The big piece here is York Bowen’s (1884-1961), for long the wunderkind of the RAM, eclipsing composers like Bax who eventually overtook him. Bowen, the finest British pianist of his time, has the distinction of being the first ever to record Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 in 1925. There’s a recording of his own 4th Piano Concerto and though he wrote four symphonies it’s his piano music that’s best known, including his six Sonatas and short Sonata.
This Viola Sonata No. 2 Op 22 of 1911 shows how Tertis (performer of Bowen’s two Sonatas and so many more) enjoyed a fresh if conservative idiom. It’s flecked with Rachmaninov but bustling with melodic flair and an incandescent optimism, a little like the Bridge. The balance here though is heavily to the piano’s credit; at times this work, though the second Bowen had attempted, sounds like another Piano Sonata with viola obbligato.
There are though viola leads where Nakajima accents the wistful bloom of a distant summer till Sanou’s pianism thrusts forward with melodic material so rich it could stand on its own. The Allegro assai e semplice is anything then but simple, but the viola gains something of the upper hand in these two streams of melody. Bowen comes up in these performances as fresh, with his own voice and delicacy amongst the arabesques.
The Grave movement too is a misnomer. It’s a storm in Sittingbourne, a heavy shower and rather dark clouds oppressing a work which should be pensive and relatively tranquil, with this marking. It’s anything but, with a tumultuous middle section that almost lasts to the end and tricks you into thinking you’re being treated to a Berwald-like two-in-one movement; that we’re hurtling to the finish.
The finale an Allegro giocoso though arrives as a mainspring of release, as its title suggests. Bowen delights in angular joshing phrases that gawk and thrust like fast-growing adolescents let loose on a dance floor. The Edwardian sunlight lasts a little longer. Never such innocence again.
A fine flourish and peroration from Nakajima, and Sanou ably swerves overwhelming with the chiming melodic chords Bowen gifts the pianist. One wonders what Tertis would have done. Grabbed his huge Tertis model viola I suppose, and tried to dominate through sheer heft and tone. These soloists need do no such thing, but land the music with aplomb and finesse. A terrific, indeed unique opener to 2025 concerts here.