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The viola sings out: Reviews of recordings by Kim Kashkashian

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  • The viola sings out: Reviews of recordings by Kim Kashkashian

    Los Angeles Times, CA
    Nov 1 2009


    The viola sings out
    Reviews of recordings by Kim Kashkashian, Yuri Bashmet, David Aaron
    Carpenter, Eliesha Nelson and others.

    David Aaron Carpenter is an up-and-comer. (Aline Paley)

    By MARK SWED

    Music Critic

    November 1, 2009
    E-mail Print Share Text Size

    Google "viola joke" and you'll be rewarded with thousands, an
    afternoon's worth of hilarity at the expense of one of the most
    expressive sound producing machines ever conjured up.

    Here's a popular example: What's the difference between a viola and a
    trampoline? You take your shoes off to jump on a trampoline.

    I learned that one from a violist who, like many of his colleagues,
    collects the jokes and posts them online. Why shouldn't he? He lives a
    charmed life with a string instrument mellower than a violin and more
    agile than a cello, a mechanism of magic, under his chin every day. He
    has no need for insecurity.

    Even so, violists have traditionally fought for the limelight and
    seldom won, which may explain why the viola world has had its share of
    unstable characters as well. Covered by the higher and lower strings,
    the viola easily gets lost in the orchestra or a string quartet. The
    instrument lacks the stellar solo repertoire for violin or cello. For
    some inexplicable reason, such accomplished viola players as Mozart,
    Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Dvorák seldom featured the instrument in
    their scores. Of the handful of viola soloists who became famous, none
    has been a household name to rival the great violinists and cellists.

    That doesn't mean we need pity the poor violist. Things began looking
    up for the viola in the 20th century when notable viola concertos
    began being written. Things are looking up even more in the 21st. We
    now have several fine soloists on the scene, much new viola music
    being written for them, and neglected earlier viola music is being
    rediscovered. The viola has even become hip in the twentysomething new
    music club crowd. And many recent CDs have come out to prove all of
    this.

    A strong contender for classical CD of the year and one that early
    Christmas shoppers should begin stocking up on is the latest ECM
    release featuring the extraordinary Armenian American violist Kim
    Kashkashian. The disc is titled "Neharót," after a stunningly
    beautiful and profoundly moving piece written for her by the Israeli
    composer Betty Olivero.

    "Neharót Neharót" was written in 2006 in the midst of Israel's war
    with Hezbollah in Lebanon. The title is Hebrew for "Rivers Rivers," an
    allusion to the tears of women but also to nehar, which means ray of
    hope. For viola, accordion, percussion, two string ensembles and tape,
    it melds many sad songs, not only Jewish but Kurdish and North
    African, into a rapturous whole; the viola (which has a range common
    to the voices of women and men) is here the great healer.

    Olivero's piece is followed on Kashkashian's CD by Tigran Mansurian's
    "Three Arias (Sung out the window facing Mount Ararat)," resplendent
    works for solo viola and chamber orchestra by Armenia's leading
    composer. This disc concludes with another beautiful Israeli work --
    Eitan Steinberg's "Rava Deravin" for viola and string quartet -- a
    haunting prayer in muted but glowing colors that finds common
    spiritual ground in Hasidic and Armenian song, the song of
    Holocaust-scarred peoples.

    A warning: Do not download this recording. Buy the CD and play it
    through loudspeakers. This is music that embraces the world, and it
    needs to radiate in a space far more expansive than your cranium.

    A star violist may be on the horizon. David Aaron Carpenter is a young
    American who makes his disc debut with recordings of a viola
    arrangement of Elgar's Cello Concerto and of Alfred Schnittke's Viola
    Concerto. Christoph Eschenbach, a champion of Carpenter, conducts the
    Philharmonia Orchestra.

    Elgar's autumnal concerto floats on air in its viola arrangement, and
    Carpenter has a robust sound and mercurial personality. Schnittke's
    concerto, which obsesses over cadences and short motifs while making
    radical stylist shifts, was written for the Russian virtuoso Yuri
    Bashmet, perhaps the most celebrated violist of our day. Carpenter
    goes to town with the score.

    Bashmet himself makes an appearance on a collection of Bartók
    concertos on Deutsche Grammophon with Pierre Boulez conducting the
    Berlin Philharmonic. This instant classic has Gidon Kremer playing the
    First Violin Concerto and Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Tamara Stefanovich
    tackling the Concerto for Two Pianos, Percussion and Orchestra.

    The real highlight is the Viola Concerto. It is a problem piece, since
    Bartók died before completing it and the final score was put together
    by Tibor Serly from extensive sketches. For that reason -- and just
    violists' luck -- what surely would have been the greatest viola
    concerto up to that time never fully materialized. But Bartók left
    material enough for an eloquent score to be realized, and the three Bs
    (Bashmet, Boulez and Berlin) elevate the composer's final thoughts
    probably as high as they can go.

    Quincy Porter, an American composer who died in 1966, probably is
    better known as an educator. He was also a violist, and if you are
    viola conspiracy theorist, you might suspect that the instrument was
    the reason for his being overlooked. Maybe it was. Much terrific
    American viola music, including Morton Feldman's "The Viola in My
    Life" and John Harbison's Viola Concerto, doesn't get the attention it
    deserves. But the viola revival and a splendid new generation of
    American violists are about to change all that.

    So all hail to Eliesha Nelson, a young African American violist from
    North Pole, Alaska (really), who has taken a fancy to Porter and
    recorded his complete works for viola on Dorian. She is a marvelous
    player, and Porter's is marvelous music.

    Porter's Viola Concerto, written in 1948, seems to flow and flow. Its
    four movements are slow, fast, slow, fast, but the piece inhabits a
    middle path, where slow feels ever moving and fast feels like there is
    always time to stop and smell the roses. "Rivers, Rivers" could be a
    Quincy Porter title as well, except he stayed away from poetic titles.
    "Blues Lontains" for viola and piano was about as fancy as he got.

    Nelson is a ravishing violist, and she is joined on the disc by an
    impressively multitalented John McLaughlin Williams, who conducts
    Northwest Sinfonia in the concerto, and he accompanies Nelson on viola
    duos for piano, harpsichord and violin. This disc is a real find.

    The Irish violist Garth Knox, formerly a member of the adventurous
    Arditti Quartet, is now an adventurous soloist and composer in his own
    right. Although he has long been associated with hard-core European
    Modernism, he has branched out into early music playing the Baroque
    viola d'amore, which has sympathetic vibrating strings, as well as
    more folk-based new music. He put out a stunning solo CD last year
    that was all over the map. He has followed that with a new one, "Viola
    Spaces," on Mode that is also all over the map even though this time
    he composed all the music.

    In a series of eight etudes, he explores ways of producing sound on
    the viola, using up to four different instruments. He then follows
    that up with a series of variations on the music of Marin Marais, a
    Baroque French composer. In addition he offers an entertaining viola
    and tuba duet and a lovely fantasy for viola d'amore and five violas
    based on Johannes Ockegham's 15th century music.

    The hipster in the bunch is Nadia Serota, who plays solo viola music
    by fashionable young New York composers on "First Things First." The
    disc is on New Amsterdam Records. At least I think they are
    fashionable young New Yorkers. There are no program notes, which are
    considered passé in downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn new music clubs
    these days. The drink menu is thought the place for description and
    intellectual rigor.

    Nico Muhly is the featured composer on Serota's program, and there are
    additional works by Judd Greenstein and Marcos Balter. All the music
    is facile, the products of composers in love with a few good ideas
    worked into the ground. But there is a good time to be had, what with
    these cocksure composers and Serota, who is an engagingly bouncy
    violist, obviously in no mood to let a little lamentation wreck their
    party.

    The viola, they're no doubt saying, is the future.

    http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news /arts/la-ca-viola1-2009nov01,0,4256543.story
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