JAVS Fall 2011

transcription of Bach’s Chromatic Fantasy , where the transcriber appears to have “wrongly” copied certain notes from Bach’s original.) In the one recorded extract we have of Borisovsky playing Balcony Scene , on his 1951 recording released originally on Melodiya and re-released on Vista-Vera (VVCD – 00076), many of the dynamics and bowings in the published music are not observed. however, this live recording is extremely moving, full of natural rubato and a deep, penetrating sound that gets straight to the heart of the music and gives us a teasing glimpse of how he might have played the suites. Given that, as violists, our biggest challenge in adapt ing a work is usually how to handle writing for the piano, Borisovsky’s piano parts are particularly superb. he did, of course, have Prokofiev’s piano score available, but his piano parts differ considerably from those of the composer’s. Borisovsky exploits the full potential of the instruments—both individually and in their interplay—to expand the potential palette of colors. his use of the two violas and piano in Morning Serenade provides a good illustration, as does Carnival . All extracts, as a result, have much more of a “duo” feel than most transcriptions. Techniques such as pizzicato, sul ponticello bowing (most strikingly in Dance of the Knights in the fast triplet section), and ricochet bowing (in Carnival ) are cleverly used as are Borisovsky’s natural and artificial harmonic passages, including the notoriously awk ward Dance of the Knights passage with stretches of a fifth on the C string that leave many violists wishing they were playing on a smaller instrument. Example 4a shows this passage in the Chant du Monde edi tion, while example 4b shows the way in which it is usually performed (the printed bowing here is from the Masters Music edition). One unique request by the transcriber, in Carnival , is to play “quasi tamburo militare,” in which “the nail of the second finger of the left hand is placed just the right distance from the C string that, when plucked, it hits the nail and rebounds with a sound similar to that of a small drum.” Example 5 shows how this is marked in the Chant du Monde edition.

the above extract could have been directly transcribed from a differently-structured sequence of scenes from an early draft of the score. however, it seems very unlikely that this could have been the case for the most substantial of all the excerpts, the Parting Scene and Death of Juliet , which inevitably takes the listener (and indeed performers) on a deeply moving journey. The transitions between sections, extraordinarily, seem to work more smoothly than those in Prokofiev’s final movement in the Ten Pieces for Piano extracted from the ballet. Though original composi tions by Borisovsky are currently nigh on impossible to find, he wrote several works for his instrument— and it appears most probable that he was the one who had the inspired idea of connecting music from several sections in the latter part of the ballet into one organic movement. It is unclear whether the violin version championed by Oistrakh followed its viola counterpart or vice-versa, but it is worth noting that Borisovsky’s viola version is transposed up a tone from the original key for the majority of the excerpt. Still more ingeniously, at the transition to bar 64, Borisovsky discreetly changes key up a tone rather than the original score’s semitone, in order to pre serve a more viola-friendly tonality for the remainder of the piece. Exploring the Potential of the Orchestral Reduction Prokofiev’s score is famously colorful and varied, and the transcriptions retain an amazing amount of this. The dynamic contours created by the interplay of different orchestral instruments is, generally, specified by Borisovsky more precisely in the transcriptions than in the original score, resulting in what seem to be “over-marked” viola parts (there are seventeen dynamic and expression marks in the first seven bars of Introduction , for instance). Such markings are often at odds with Prokofiev’s original, potentially creating the challenge for the performer of whether to take the transcription at face value or explore the possibility of being more faithful to the original. This is made more difficult by the fact that none of the published versions gives the impression of having been thoroughly edited or checked. (A more extreme example of such a dilemma is in performing Kodaly’s

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