Brighton Year-Round 2026

Yohei Nakajjina and Miho Sanou Viola and Piano Recital St Nicholas Church, Brighton

Yohei Nakajjina and Miho Sanou

Genre: Live Music, Music

Venue: St Nicholas Church, Dyke Road, Brighton

Festival: Brighton Year-Round

Low Down

Review

Violist Yohei Nakajjina and pianist Miho Sanou make a welcome return. They arrive with two less well-known classics: the Hindemith Viola Sonata Op 11/4 (he wrote seven for viola with or without piano) and the Rebecca Clarke Viola Sonata.

Not less well known from the viola repertoire because they’re both famous works. But because the viola itself is less sung.  But it certainly sings here in these two great works, composed within a few years of each other: in 1915 and 1919 respectively.

First up the romantic – yes romantic Paul  Hindemith (1895-1963): before he became all gnarly buttons to borrow a phrase of John Adams about clarinets. The viola was Hindemith’s instrument, as it was Clarke’s. Indeed Hindemith gave the premiere of Walton’s Viola Concerto after Lionel Tertis rejected it (which he immediately regretted and went on to champion the work).

The Hindemith opens with a surpassingly romantic Fantasie, a dream of better times and swoops into its main theme with melismatic regret. Strauss, Mahler, Zemlinsky, Schreker, perhaps the early Schoenberg: it’s the hothouse fin-de-siecle symbolism personified.

This is followed by a Thema with Variations which shows a bit more of the formalism of the mature Hindemith; but tonally still rapt.  It’s a structural outpouring succeeded by a return to the main theme with a Finale also with Variations. Altogether the most attractive chamber work Hindemith composed. But greater things in the viola and elsewhere were to come.

Rebecca Clarke (1886-1979) is being rediscovered. Not least recently for her songs. Her largest two works are connected. Nobody could believe this 1919 work was written by a woman but the winner of the Carnegie Competition she nearly won – Ernest Bloch – was to profoundly influence her: particularly in their shared Jewish heritage. Her Bloch-inflected 1921 Piano Trio should be played as often as her Viola Sonata.

That earlier work was more clearly influenced by her teacher Vaughan Williams. and by modal scales and harmonies out of English pastoralism. But Clarke sounds like no-one else.

The first movement Impetuoso lives up to the de Musset superscription: “for I have poured out the wine of youth” and Clarke certainly did that. The soaring first note theme with two tied notes each is like a clarion call answered by a modal cascade of scales. It’s passionate, erotic even, and shows almost a riddle between two nodes of composition dazzlingly unified. It works itself out and then –

Here Clarke invented the fast central Vivace movement Arnold Bax took up in his Viola Sonata of 1921 and Walton in his Viola Concerto – yes the one Hindemith performed – in 1929. And again in his Violin Concerto of 1939 for Jascha Heifetz.

This Vivace glitters between piano and viola in a skittering high wire dance that sounds intoxicated wild and at a fantastically boppy party of Young Things in the earliest days of Flappers and all kinds of decommissioned people.

The underlying harmony, despite the greater percussive reach of the piano, is though the same. Here is added a manic tempo and the four notes become a triolet figure with an emphasis on the first giving a kind of quick step feel. But the sharp brilliance of writing is more modernist and exhilaratingly brief. It might start as a dance but who knows where it ends up?

The Adagio-Allegretto, also followed by Bax and Walton, seems like the morning after, or perhaps after consummation. The Adagio part is the quiet before the storm as the Allegretto returns triumphantly to the opening theme with clangourous pianistic figures and a major key sonance around even the minor moments. The cumulative build is intoxicating again these players’ hands. The piano takes more of a percussive modernist lead here but it’s still resolutely tonal and modal. The viola strikes through the main theme, and then the two alternate with the piano, then viola swiftly returning to the initial Adagio mode but more wakeful, watching. The piano takes quite a lead with the viola following. This of course is prepared for the apotheosis and exalted finale.

This is without doubt the greatest viola chamber work and at least as great as Walton’s concerto,  perhaps greater.

Sanou never holds back despite the viola being a delicate hothouse plant. She knows Nakajina will strike through and he does. Both now London based – Nakajima graduated from Trinity College of Music and Sanou from the Royal Academy of Music (now studying at Goldsmiths after study in Japan) – have forged a fine duo.  Theirs is a stunningly symbiotic partnership. Consummate musicians it’ll be a pleasure to welcome them back. Again.

Published January 29, 2026 by Simon Jenner