JAVS Fall 2016

This brim-full CD (eighty minutes, eight seconds!) explores with commendable completeness the neo baroque repertoire for unaccompanied viola from the early twentieth century. The three Suites by Max Reger, written in 1915, belong of course to every violist’s stock-in-trade. We know that Reger was planning a further suite for the viola player Karl Doktor at the time of his early death. According to a creditable anecdote, Adolf Busch—Doktor’s quartet colleague and a passionate admirer of Reger’s music—wrote his own viola suite during a train ride as consolation for his friend’s disappointment over the unfulfilled promise. Busch’s composition does indeed sound like a fourth Reger suite. Its movements are similarly structured in a slow-fast-slow-fast sequence, but Busch sticks more than Reger to Baroque dance forms; all movements, apart from the opening, employ dance rhythms. The music is technically more complicated, with some rather uncomfortable chord progressions, including a passage in sixths self-accompanied by left hand pizzicatos. in Karlsruhe. He wrote numerous études, a few of which have been reprinted in Ulrich Drüner’s invaluable collection, Das Studium der Viola . The three unaccompanied suites were probably written in the last years of the nineteenth century, thus pre dating Reger by almost twenty years. As with Reger and Busch, Weinreich’s suites have four movements, which are based almost without exception on baroque dance models. Their harmonic horizon is less vast than that of Reger and Busch, but this player-friendly music constitutes—to quote the booklet notes—an interesting example of “the continuing tradition of productively internalizing Bach.” Roland Glassl, a prize-winner of both the Tertis and Primrose competitions and former member of the celebrated Mandelring Quartet, takes this music’s manifold hurdles with the greatest aplomb, making the most of its expressive potential. The warm sound of his viola has been well caught in a generous acoustic. A couple of movements sound rather rushed (perhaps the CD’s extreme length had a subconscious effect on the choice of tempo), but Glassl has a sure instinct for the shape and structure of each movement and characterizes them most excitingly. Justus Weinreich (1858-1927) hails from Kassel, Germany, and was a member of the Court Orchestra

Scott Slapin: Violacentrism – The Opera. Scott Slapin and Tanya Solomon, viola. Penn State Viola Ensemble; Tim Deighton, dir., www.violacentrism.com. At around forty-three minutes in length, Scott Slapin’s Violacentrism – The Opera runs head to head alongside Harold in Italy as the longest viola joke ever. But then, as opposed to the latter, this really is a joke, and one of a particularly elaborate and subtle kind. You probably won’t laugh out loud very often, but you must be made of very stern stuff indeed if you are not smiling snugly after listening to this recording. The booklet gives a short synopsis of the story involving Cremonus, God of the Viola, his anger at man’s creation of other instruments and his quest to convince mankind of the greatness of his chosen instrument. The piece is scored for two violas, and nothing more is indeed necessary to convey all the moods depicted in the music. Slapin’s score operates with various leitmotifs to guide the listener through the plot. These are introduced during the eight-minute Overture and provide the thematic tissue of the following eight numbers, which include, of all things, a lesson in Music History ( Five Centuries in Five Minutes ) and a musical-within-the-opera ( Violist under the Roof ). Perhaps the joke becomes too localized in The Sounds of Hampshire County (where—you guessed it—the composer is based), but the sounds we hear of musicians trying out instruments at the local luthier’s shop are the same anywhere in the world.

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Journal of the American Viola Society / Vol. 32, No. 2, Fall 2016