Sound – tonal quality. All string players need a good one. A few have a distinctive one. Timothy Ridout, though, has an extraordinary one – a sound so ravishingly warm, sparklingly alive and lyrical, and of such clarity and projection that it first caught and held my rapt attention not even as he played as a soloist, but rather as I heard him as an eminently sensitive second viola in Tchaikovsky’s Souvenir de Florence sextet in March 2017 at London’s Wigmore Hall, alongside his then fellow students from Germany’s prestigious Kronberg Academy. A sound which meant that I couldn’t get my hands on his debut album fast enough when it was released the following month: he’d recorded Vieuxtemps’s complete works for viola and piano for Champs Hill as part of his prize for winning, aged 19, the 2014 Cecil Aronowitz International Viola Competition. A sound which in early 2019 compelled me to follow him to Switzerland’s Sommets Musicaux de Gstaad to hear him compete for – and win – its own recording-shaped prize for best young artist recital; and which prompted festival artistic director Renaud Capuçon, rushing backstage afterwards to congratulate him, to stop by me just long enough to exclaim, ‘What a sound! You must be so happy that he’s British.’

Thereafter, this sound has fuelled an international career crescendo so rapid and sustained that there isn’t room here to cover all the further gongs and honours. Among them, however, are his being made a 2019-21 BBC New Generation Artist, his receiving in 2020 the Hamburger Symphoniker’s inaugural Sir Jeffrey Tate Prize, and in 2021 his joining the Bowers Program of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, New York.

I can also provide a reminder of his recent Gramophone Awards successes: he won the 2023 Concerto Award for his second Harmonia Mundi album, featuring Tertis’s viola version of Elgar’s Cello Concerto and Bartók’s Suite with Martyn Brabbins and the BBC SO; then made the 2024 Chamber shortlist for ‘A Lionel Tertis Celebration’, recorded with his regular duo partners Frank Dupree and James Baillieu.

It’s no wonder, then, that when one late November morning in 2024 I pitch up at his home for this interview and hear that phenomenal sound singing urgent and virtuosic unknown music from the other side of the door (turns out it was Mark Simpson’s viola concerto, newly completed for Ridout), it takes a Herculean effort to ring the bell rather than just stand there and listen – not least because Ridout, who has a longstanding genuine enjoyment of scales and studies, also has a stupendous technique. Still, once we’ve settled in his living room, coffee mugs in hand (and yes, Ridout even brews a great coffee), the solo viola theme only intensifies, because we’re discussing his very first solo unaccompanied album – fruit of a solo recital he conceived and performed at Wigmore Hall, London, in 2023.

‘As a viola player, one doesn’t perform unaccompanied so often,’ he points out, ‘and it’s something I really love to do. I love the repertoire, and the musical challenge of being on stage alone, without others to be inspired by and bounce off; and having to really go within oneself and think, “Actually, how do I want to play the piece?” – and create my own narrative arc.’

In recording sessions at the Church of St Silas the Martyr in Kentish Town, London: Ridout feels fortunate in having had plenty of time to work on his first solo album

photography: Ting-Ru Lai

Wigmore opportunity in hand, the work that then served first as his conceptual starting point, and ultimately as the concert’s and now also the album’s climax, was Bach’s Partita No 2 in D minor for solo violin, with its monumental concluding Chaconne. ‘The Chaconne has fascinated me since I was 13 or 14,’ he explains. ‘This was when I became serious about the viola, and with YouTube still quite a new thing, I naturally started to look online; and because there weren’t yet so many videos of great viola players, those teenage years were instead spent discovering the great violinists of the 20th century – Grumiaux, Heifetz, Perlman … – and all their amazing recordings of everything from the Brahms Concerto to the five Mozart concertos and Sibelius. But one of the very first works I discovered and became obsessed by was the Bach Chaconne. It just encapsulated everything that was possible on a string instrument. It’s got counterpoint. It’s got the full harmonies. It’s got this huge range of human emotion and expression; the way its middle section enters the major and just sort of lifts you up … Grumiaux was the violinist I probably listened to the most, but there’s an amazing video of Itzhak Perlman at St John’s Smith Square in 1978; then as I developed my knowledge about style, I discovered historically informed recordings such as Rachel Podger’s.’ Clearly at that point the Chaconne was beyond Ridout’s capabilities, but he remembers learning Bach’s Sonata in A minor for solo violin and the fugue from the Sonata in C. He began performing the Chaconne five years ago, then used the pandemic to ‘properly tackle’ Partita No 2 as a whole.

As for how Ridout tackles the Chaconne on the viola, the answer is, with exactly the same positions and fingerings as it would be played on a violin – thus sounding a fifth lower, in accordance with the viola being tuned a fifth lower – with the exception of one particular chord: ‘I don’t know whether any Gramophone listeners will hear it,’ he smiles, ‘but it’s the piece’s one triad, and although one can play it the way a violinist would, there’s a very, very high probability of it being out of tune. So that one I split. With a smaller viola than mine [Ridout plays a stunning and comparatively large Peregrino Di Zanetto viola from 1565-75], one could probably just play it exactly the same as one would on a violin, but I find that on my viola this single tiny amendment means that it just resonates and sounds better.’

Programming outwards from the Chaconne, Ridout then chose for its twin pillar – again, for both the concert and now the album – a modern work, Caroline Shaw’s In manus tuas, having discovered her string orchestra piece Entr’acte when 12 Ensemble performed it for a Wigmore Hall pandemic broadcast. ‘I just thought, “Wow!” So then I looked into what else she had done, and discovered In manus tuas. She wrote it in 2009 for solo cello, but there’s a YouTube video of her performing it herself on the viola, and I was immediately very, very interested. The piece is a nice mix of old and new, inspired by the Thomas Tallis motet of the same name.’

Between these two, Ridout similarly programmed for Wigmore Hall a further mix of Baroque and more modern works. Not all of these made it onto the album for reasons of space, but the other modern piece that did is Britten’s Elegy, dating from 1930 when the composer was 16 but neither performed nor published in his lifetime. After its rediscovery, its 1984 first performance was given by Ridout’s Kronberg Academy viola teacher, Nobuko Imai. ‘This is a fascinating piece,’ enthuses Ridout. ‘A really beautiful, lonely soliloquy for the solo viola which fits very well to the instrument, written the day after Britten left school. He played the viola a lot at that time in his life, and actually wrote a few other early pieces for it that were also never published and are beautiful.’

Three Telemann solo violin fantasias, all anonymously transcribed for the viola, formed the remainder of the recital’s Baroque element, and from these Ridout plucked No 1 in B flat, TWV 40:14, and No 7 in E flat, TWV 40:20, for the album. ‘It’s such elegant, charming music,’ he enthuses. ‘The Telemann Viola Concerto is, of course, a very important piece in the repertoire, and while sadly there are no solo viola fantasias, these violin ones work really well. I think the viola even potentially adds something that’s not possible on the violin when it comes to the resonance of the bass notes – when Telemann writes one and then layers some notes over the top.’

The final magic ingredients of the album (recorded at the Church of St Silas the Martyr, Kentish Town, London) are Ridout’s regular production team, producer Andrew Keener and sound engineer Dave Rowell, in combination with another much rarer luxury when recording: time. ‘We had about three and a half days on this occasion,’ he recounts, with gratitude. ‘These pieces require the most that I can give, my utmost intensity, and it was only me in the room, without another musician to give me energy. So it was great having that time for it.’

Technically, we’ve reached the end of the album-related discussion, but – when so much of the talk has centred on works not originally conceived for the viola, and in the context of this being such a theme across Ridout’s wider discography – I can’t resist a final U-turn in the name of a little further unpacking of his attitudes towards transcriptions, and Ridout himself is thoroughly game for this. ‘That’s always an interesting topic,’ he muses, ‘and the first thing to say is that I just love recording great music. Of course, there’s amazing original viola music, but there’s also a lot of wonderful other music which I would say fits extremely well to the viola, and which perhaps would (along with similar pieces) have been written for the viola had the composer had the right advocate for whom to write, and therefore completely deserves to be played on it.

‘Moving on to how I approach transcriptions musically, inevitably with the Bach and Telemann on this album, I have listened a lot to the violin recordings so am very aware of how the music sounds and must feel on the violin. But at the end of the day, I’m not trying to emulate that. I want to play this music in the way that fits best to the viola, and must think of how best to transmit the composer’s musical intention – rather than just what they wrote down – to the audience. So at a certain point I kind of forget about the original and am just thinking about that feeling of playing it, and about its musical narrative.’

The musical narrative arguably at the top of Ridout’s mind on this November morning is, however, neither a transcription nor any solo unaccompanied work, but rather the piece that’s eyeballing us from his music stand: that aforementioned Simpson viola concerto, Hold your Heart in your Teeth, commissioned with funds from Ridout’s 2020 Borletti-Buitoni Trust Fellowship award. This interview is happening just 16 days before its mid-December premiere at the Berlin Philharmonie with Robin Ticciati and the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin – Ridout’s debut both with them and at that venue.

When I finally pop a question about it, his face lights up. ‘It’s an amazing piece!’ he glows. ‘Really extremely exciting. Very different. I first got to know his music when I played in the world premiere of the Oboe Quartet he wrote for Nicholas Daniel, in 2019 at Wigmore Hall with Guy Johnston on the cello and Jackie Shave on violin. I was amazed by how intense and passionate and exciting and lyrical and wild the piece was, so fairly soon afterwards we got into discussions. Mark is an absolute genius at building up excitement and tension, and he writes in a very virtuosic way for the viola, really pushing the limits of what’s possible, but with everything having a really clear musical point – there are no sounds or extended techniques purely for the sake of it. I really hope this is a piece that will stay in my repertoire for the rest of my performing life.’

Certainly, Ridout has several further performances of it booked with other orchestras. Meanwhile, a newly premiered piano-accompanied work he’ll be championing is Shadow Walkers, written for him by American composer Nahre Sol as a co-commission from the Konzerthaus Dortmund, Schloss Elmau, the Verbier Festival and the University of Birmingham, where he premiered it in October with Jonathan Ware. ‘Nahre Sol is a fascinating musician,’ he begins, thoroughly warmed to the new music theme. ‘She’s also a very prolific and popular YouTuber. She has this wonderful way of talking about harmony and music theory, piano technique and improvisation that’s at a really high level but also extremely accessible; and her style is also very fresh and very new, but also something very, very familiar. It’s not like wild and crazy in the same way that Mark’s music is, but it’s extremely touching and beautiful.’

So with commissioning clearly something he sees as part of his role as a viola player, what is it that draws him to a composer? ‘The two things that really attract me are beautiful music and exciting music, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be both at the same time,’ he replies, without blinking. Catching the scent of a more involved discussion, I ask where he thinks we are right now with modern composition. ‘To be really honest, I’m generally more drawn to music which has some roots in tonality, because I think that we as humans have an innate connection to harmony and melody. I see it even with my six-month-old daughter. During the summer, she was listening to me rehearse the Dvořák Piano Quartet in E flat at the Sion Festival in Switzerland with Janine Jansen, Pablo Ferrández and Denis Kozhukhin. In the slow movement there’s a beautiful cello theme, then suddenly a descending chromatic scale and a transition into intense F sharp minor, and she just screamed at the modulation, which was so appropriate! We have such strong emotional links to major, minor, even chromatic and whole-tone music, before we’ve even been educated in any of it. So I am generally more fascinated by tonal music – though within a wide spectrum. It doesn’t have to be just C major!’

That anecdote says just as much about his musical life and partnerships these days, about which Ridout – who incidentally spent his pre-teen years focused on singing, switching allegiance to the viola only when his voice broke, but then becoming so obsessed with it that he ‘couldn’t bear to finish school’ and instead began his Royal Academy of Music undergraduate course a year early, aged 17 – talks with characteristic gratitude and a low-key sense of normality. Yet there’s nothing low-key about the other projects currently getting him excited. For instance, after making his Salzburg Festival debut last summer with Mozart’s Sinfonia concertante alongside his violinist friend Clara-Jumi Kang – which the pair played again days later at the BBC Proms – he has ‘quite amazingly’ been invited straight back this summer to perform his own transcription of Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto. Future recordings will include a pairing of that Mozart concerto with Hummel’s Potpourri for viola and orchestra (‘one arrangement and one original work, which seems to be a theme in a lot of my albums!’), both pieces also featuring in his concert schedule in the UK and beyond. And this year for the first time he also will tackle Bliss’s Viola Sonata, another work written for Tertis (‘there’s a lot of stuff still to explore from Tertis – he commissioned so many things’), including via the world premiere of Philip Wilby’s new ‘concerto’ orchestration at the Ryedale Festival, North Yorkshire.

In fact, one suspects that viola players will one day be similarly talking about all the ‘stuff to explore’ that Ridout had a hand in. What is true in the meantime, though, is that now, only a comparatively short time after Ridout exploded onto the classical music world’s general radar, it’s impossible to contemplate a musical landscape without him – or his sound.

Timothy Ridout’s new Harmonia Mundi album is released February 21