Born in Nottingham England in 1862 Edmund Severn moved to the United States at the age of four along with his family who settled in Hartford Connecticut. Severn began to study the Violin with guidance from his father who taught the instrument professionally. He later studied with Franz Milcke and Bernard Listemann concertmaster of the Boston Symphony Orchestra before moving to Berlin to study bowing technique under Emanuel Wirth the first assistant of Joseph Joachim at the Berlin Hochschule. As a composer Edmund Severn wrote mainly orchestral music as well as many pieces for the Violin including a concerto; he also wrote three stringquartets.To this day the Polish Dance for Violin and Piano has remained Severnâ??s most famous work. The piece is arranged here by Alan Arnold for Viola and Piano.

Shostakovich's last work the Sonata For Viola And Piano Op.147 is a superbly crafted Sonata in three movements with unusually a slow Adagio movement for the third. It was dedicated to the violist Fyodor Druzhinin a professor of the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory and a member of the Beethoven String Quartet a renowned Moscow ensemble that played at the premieres of most of Shostakovich’s string quartets. Fyodor Druzhinin and Mikhail Muntyan premiered the Viola Sonata in Leningrad on October 1 1975.The solo Viola part is also included on a separate insert.

Elizabeth Maconchy composed her Sonata For Viola And Piano in 1937 which premiered the following year in London. Included in this is the Score and Parts for Viola and Piano with the piece lasting around14 minutes. Elizabeth Maconchy enrolled at the Royal College of Music at the age of sixteen and while her String Quartets are often seen by many as the pinnacle of her musical achievements thisSonata For Viola And Piano is a beautiful interplay between the two instruments and must surely rank as one of the finest Viola sonatas ever composed.