Bryony Gibson-Cornish and her Amati: the viola of her dreams
Bryony Gibson-Cornish and her Amati viola
Photo credit: Sam Cornish
Just over a year ago, New Zealand violist Bryony Gibson-Cornish was in tears at Finsbury Park Station in London. Having discovered, played and fallen in love with a 400-year-old Brothers Amati viola, she had just returned it to its owners, to be taken to a dealer for sale. After a few months playing the viola, while trying unsuccessfully to find a way to purchase it, Gibson-Cornish, heart-broken at the loss of the instrument of her dreams, had said goodbye. She believed she’d never see the instrument again.
Luckily, the story of “Bryony and her Amati” didn’t end there.
It began about a decade earlier when, as a student at the Juilliard School in New York, Gibson-Cornish heard Misha Amory of the Brentano Quartet play his own Amati viola. “From that moment,” she told me in a recent interview, “I became obsessed with the sound that’s specific to Amati violas. It’s unique, there’s a focus to it, something about the richness but also the variability, the sort of halo of sounds Misha could make. He had this way of making it come out through the string quartet texture.”
Gibson-Cornish, born in New Zealand into a musical family, began playing the violin aged three, she thinks. “I don’t remember ever not playing an instrument. I started with Suzuki violin, then traditional violin and I switched to the viola aged about 12. I think the viola chose me.”
As a teenager, she played chamber music, competing in a string quartet in chamber music contests, and playing in the Christchurch Symphony Orchestra and National Youth Orchestra. She also pursued a parallel dream to be an opera singer, studying voice with Dame Malvina Major. Gibson-Cornish kept both strands going through undergraduate years at Canterbury University, but voice studies went to the back burner after visiting American violinist Charlie Castleman encouraged her to audition as a violist for the Juilliard School.
Gibson-Cornish was 19 years old when she went to New York. “I never thought I’d be able to study at a school at that level,” she remembers. “It was life changing. I was this little Kiwi kid, trying to play the viola well, and there were more viola players in that Juilliard building than I’d ever encountered in all of New Zealand.” Overwhelmed with choices, she extended her two year Master’s programme for an extra year and included composition and historical performance. Her studies were supported by a Fulbright Scholarship and a scholarship from Juilliard, supplemented by grants and other funding from New Zealand sources.
While in New York, she heard the Brentano Quartet and Amory’s Amati as often as she could. “I just spent ages bathing in that sound,” says Gibson-Cornish, who found a thought had fixed in her mind: “A violist in a quartet has to play an Amati.” She was aware of other examples; Gillian Ansell in the New Zealand String Quartet and Krzysztof Chorzelski from the Belcea Quartet both play violas by Nicolò Amati, the third generation of Amati luthiers.
After graduating from Juilliard, Gibson-Cornish moved to London, where she joined her brother, bassoonist Todd Gibson-Cornish, as a student at the Royal College of Music. Her student years there were starry, culminating in the award of the prestigious Tagore Gold Medal when graduating with her Artist Diploma in Viola.
Joining the international prize-winning Marmen Quartet shortly afterwards, she found herself back at the College with that ensemble for another Artist Diploma, this one in Chamber Music.
The Marmen Quartet
(from left) Irish cellist Sinéad O'Halloran, violinists Johannes Marmen from Sweden and Swiss-born Laia Valentin Braun, New Zealander Bryony Gibson-Cornish, violist.
Photo credit: Marco Borggreve
Fast forward to 2023, where Gibson-Cornish, 30 years old, is now professor of viola and chamber music at the Royal College of Music, teaching at the College alongside her Marmen colleagues and playing internationally with the group.
She’s been playing her 1932 Sannino viola for a few years. Though she enjoys its many good qualities, and sees it as something of a ‘training’ viola for dealing with a temperamental older instrument, it’s not quite right. “I’d been fighting with it a little,” she tells me, “because it’s quite big.”
At a dinner party in August 2023 with musical friends, Gibson-Cornish hears violinist Richard Ireland, formerly of the Chilingirian Quartet, mention “selling Dad’s Amati.” At first, she doesn’t realise he’s referring to a viola. “I may have forgotten that Richard’s father was Patrick Ireland, [original violist with the famed British ensemble, the Allegri Quartet]”. She knows that Richard’s brother, the violist Robin Ireland, has played for 20 years with the celebrated Lindsay Quartet. The conversation is about Patrick’s up-coming 100th birthday and how the brothers are getting together the next day to take his Amati viola to a dealer.
Gibson-Cornish seizes the moment. “Can I come tomorrow to play on it, for a couple of hours, before you take it to the dealer?” she asks. The following day she goes to Richard Ireland’s house. The Amati is waiting for her on the grand piano in the Ireland’s beautiful music studio. “Make yourself at home and just try it,” her host says.
Telling me the story, Gibson-Cornish becomes a little emotional. “Just being in the room with it felt as if something amazing was about to happen. I felt connected not only to the instrument but to the history it has. It had been in quartets for all these decades already, and just looking at it, I felt this was the most beautiful viola I’d ever seen.
To her relief, the 1610 Brothers Amati viola was quite small compared to her own viola, “skinnier, and the scroll was really tiny in comparison to mine”. She picked it up and played some of the solo Bach she uses daily for warming up.
“I’ll never forget hearing it for the first time. I was completely overwhelmed by the overtones; I’d never experienced such a ‘sonic bath’. I played on it for a while, and also played it to Richard, and I think he too felt that something special was happening.”
Not knowing how she would manage to purchase the instrument, Gibson-Cornish sought and gained permission to play it with the Marmen Quartet, to make sure it was what she wanted before embarking on fund-raising. “I played in some rehearsals, and it was just a dream. Suddenly, I could hear all my colleagues. I’d never played on a viola where I could go hell-for-leather while hearing everyone else - that was an amazing experience.”
Bryony Gibson-Cornish
“…playing the Amati in rehearsals with the Marmen Quartet was just a dream.”
Photo credit: Ali Johnston
The viola’s connection to the Lindsay Quartet also felt significant. One of the Marmen Quartet’s first awards was a place on a mentoring scheme run by Peter Cropper, first violinist in the Lindsay Quartet and something of a legend in the string quartet world. “Johannes Marmen said to me on that first day,” Gibson-Cornish recalls, “if this viola ends up in this quartet, I think I might cry.”
A couple of months of playing the Amati went by before Gibson-Cornish, unsuccessful in her quest to find an individual to purchase the instrument, had to return it to the Irelands for sale. “I’ll never forget that emptiness that I felt in not having it; that was really awful. I thought I’d never see it again.”
A few weeks after that tearful farewell, the Marmen Quartet played a concert at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge. Afterwards, Gibson-Cornish dashed off to the station to catch the London train while her colleagues, violinist Marmen and cellist Sinéad O'Halloran, accepted a ride to the station from “a kindly gentleman”. When he introduced himself as Colin Smithers, chairman of the Stradivari Trust, the conversation in the car turned to “Bryony and the Amati.”
Over lunch a couple of days later, an amazed Gibson-Cornish learned from Smithers that, although it would be a complicated process, it was possible for the Stradivari Trust to get behind her. After a couple of nail-biting months, the Trust was able to purchase the instrument, while continuing to assemble a syndicate of people to buy shares in the viola.
For Gibson-Cornish, the arrangement means she has 20 years to buy back the Amati, purchasing shares in the scheme over that time. She’ll officially be the guardian of the instrument once the syndicate has a complete group of investors - about £100,000 is still to be raised.
“At the moment,” she says, “we have contributors from £5,000 to £50,000, a range of different people from different backgrounds who were willing to buy into it. They’ll get their investment back at the end of it. I’m also selling my old viola, so I’ll start in the scheme owning about a quarter of it.”
Bryony Gibson-Cornish and her viola in Wanaka after the premiere of a new work by composer Eve de Castro-Robinson
(From left) De Castro-Robinson, Julian Bliss (clarinet), Sterling Elliot (cello), Gibson-Cornish (viola) and Justine Cormack (violin).
Photo supplied by the AWE Festival
Meanwhile, in May 2024, Gibson-Cornish was reunited with the Amati viola and last October, she brought it to New Zealand. Gibson-Cornish was a guest artist at the 2024 At the World’s Edge Festival in the Queenstown Lakes District, where I heard her play her beloved instrument. I can attest to the beauty, complexity and presence of the Amati’s sound within a chamber ensemble.
“This wonderful viola is teaching me every day, showing me all sorts of expressive possibilities and guiding me in the amazing and elusive world that is string quartet repertoire,” Gibson-Cornish wrote in a recent article for The Strad magazine. “I am lucky to call it my musical partner for the rest of my career and sincerely hope it will always be a quartet viola.”
Footnote: In January this year the Marmen Quartet’s brilliant debut album of music by Ligeti and Bartók was released on the BIS label. You can read my review of that album here.
