2024 Primrose International Viola Competition & American Viola Society Festival Program Book

2024 Primrose International Viola Competition About William Primrose

A plaque is affixed to the second story of an apartment house at 18 Wilton Drive, Glasgow. It reads:

One of the greatest musicians of all time, the viola player William Primrose, was born here, 1904.

Guided by his father, an orchestral violinist, and tutored by a student of Š evčík and Joachim, the boy’s precocity was not lost on his elders. He suffered under Ševčík exercises, but later admitted they served his left-hand facility well into late life. (The bow arm was a different matter and had to wait to be sculpted into the extraordinary mechanism it became under the influence of the great Ysaÿe.) The boy and young man became exposed to the greatest touring

artists of the day in Scotland and, later, London. Casals and the young Heifetz made profound impressions, but it was Kreisler whose influence was the most indelible. The rhythmic élan and sound became profiles of Primrose’s own performances. His early recordings as a violinist attest to his brilliance, witnessing the Rondo capriccioso of Saint-Saëns. But there had been a dormant yearning since childhood for that curiosity in his father’s cupboard, a viola. Not until his Belgian master’s encouragement to follow his predilection did the viola became a feature on Primrose’s horizon. This, despite familial disappointment and trenchant warning from a friend, “You will make the greatest mistake of your life!” Nevertheless, when the London String Quartet, on tour in America, summoned Primrose to fill in for their indisposed violist, he not only joined, he “burned his bridges,” and “walked the road to Damascus, saw the light, repented of past transgressions and switched to the viola.” Primrose, the great virtuoso of the solo viola, spent his most satisfying hours of music making in the small ensemble. Perhaps drawing him toward the collaborative art (and the viola) was the “intuitive English penchant for the center of the harmony,” as Menuhin expressed it. One can be transported by the recordings of Heifetz-Primrose- Feuermann in Mozart and Dóhnanyi, or Smetana and the Brahms B-flat by the Primrose Quartet, to be both touched and awed by such superb rapport. Why did Primrose choose to open his recording career as a violist with Paganini caprices? “Youthful pride and ambition,” he said to impress others. And in this he did not fail. But the virtuosic show pieces were not the only colors on his artistic palette. The soft supplication of Songs my mother taught me can be moving, and the rhythmic suppleness found in Sarasateana, enchanting. His stylistic affinity captures the attentive adjudicator. Whether it is the melancholy

46