Rosalind Ventris’s album in The Guardian and Gramophone

Rosalind Ventris’s debut solo album features a selection of music for unacccompanied viola composed between 1930 (Imogen Holst’s impressive Suite for Viola) and the present day (a 2020 lockdown miniature by Thea Musgrave). The largely British and Irish programme allows Ventris to revive substantial works by important yet still often overlooked twentieth-century composers – not only Holst but also Lillian Fuchs, Elizabeth Maconchy, Elisabeth Lutyens and Gra_yna Bacewicz – alongside more recent additions to the repertoire from Musgrave, Sally Beamish and Amanda Feery. With several of the composers themselves professional string players, this is, in Ventris’s words, ‘wonderful music – that just happens to be by women composers’.

Sola has been featured in The Guardian as “the other pick of the week”, with Erica Jeal writing that “Sola is a rewarding solo recital of 20th- and 21st-century music from the viola player Rosalind Ventris, who lavishes gorgeously full-bodied playing, weighty yet poised, on music by eight women. Highlights include Elisabeth Lutyens’s Echo of the Wind, Ventris’s viola all swoops and glides, Thea Musgrave’s melancholic In the Still of the Night, and a wonderfully idiomatic 1930 Suite by Imogen Holst, taken out of her usual sidekick/daughter context for once and put deservedly in the spotlight.”