In 1923, the promising composer Rebecca Clarke performed her Viola Sonata for George Eastman in his East Avenue mansion living room. That same work will get a reprise a century later—now 2023—in Eastman’s living room through the Performance Plus series on Sunday, May 21 at 3 p.m.
In the 1920s, the British-American composer Clarke was gaining notoriety in the United States after tying for first place in a 1919 competition at the Berkshire Festival of Chamber Music, sponsored by Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge. Clarke’s Viola Sonata—an unusual and stunning work that uniquely synthesizes late romantic, impressionist, and early modernist sounds and that has gained popularity among contemporary violists—went neck to neck with Ernest Block’s Suite for Viola. Her appearance in Rochester connects back to her father, who was an employee of George Eastman, serving as his European connection as well as an art and cycling buddy. Clarke’s brother Hans, a biochemist, later worked for Kodak and her other brother, Eric, managed the Eastman Theatre, prior to a post at the Metropolitan Opera.
Clarke’s composing career never fully took off, but recently, Eastman students have taken an interest in her works. Brock Tjosvold ‘22E (DMA), a recently graduated DMA collaborative pianist who will join Eastman’s faculty in the fall, first fell in love with Clarke’s music when accompanying the Viola Sonata for violist Ryan Hardcastle ‘19E (DMA), his partner (and who is also now the assistant registrar for Eastman).
Tjosvold then found another occasion to perform Clarke’s music.
“When mezzo-soprano Kyrsten Chambers Jones and I competed in the finals of the 2021 Jessie Kneisel Lieder Competition, we discovered that Clarke wrote several unpublished German songs,” he says. “We received manuscripts and permission from Christopher Johnson, Clarke’s great-nephew-by-marriage, to perform some of these rarely heard treasures.”
Chambers Jones ‘19E (MM) ‘22E (DMA) and Tjosvold will also perform some of Clarke’s unpublished songs on the Sunday concert, and Tjosvold and Hardcastle perform the Viola Sonata. Johnson, Clarke’s great nephew, will be in attendance for the concert and will give a talk about Clarke’s life and her Rochester connections.
A preview of this talk can be found on the Rebecca Clarke website, which Johnson maintains as her official biographer; he wrote an essay about Clarke’s Rochester appearance. “At the conclusion of Clarke’s round-the-world tour in 1923, she gave a command performance of her still-sensational Viola Sonata in George Eastman’s living-room (either door to the right of the staircase), where she was delighted to see her old pal Eugene Goossens, who had ‘done wonders’ with the brand-new Rochester Symphony Orchestra, and many of that orchestra’s musicians, who ‘were simply sweet.’”
Eastman doctoral musicologist Miles Greenberg, who will help host the concert as part of a collaboration between the Performance Plus series and Eastman’s musicology department, says that although it might be self-evident why Clarke wasn’t better known—she was, after all, a woman composer in the earlier twentieth century—he also says that her style wasn’t necessarily aligned with the compositional trends at the time. “I think that’s the reason why she did not quite make her way into the canon. And now, we at least on a local level are really interested in Clarke, especially because of her connections to Rochester and Eastman.”
The performers on Sunday, however, will make an appeal through their performance for Clarke’s music to be better known. The performance “gives Kyrsten and I an opportunity to bring even more of her unpublished songs back into the world,” says Tjosvold.
Sunday, May 21 at 3 p.m. at the George Eastman Museum Living Room, 900 East Avenue
Concert included with museum admission (free for members)