JAVS Spring 2013

R ECORDING R EVIEWS

by Carlos María Solare

appearance in the two movements that require a sec ond viola. How about a sequel including Borisovsky’s transcriptions from Shostakovich’s bal lets and film music? Fuchs: Sonata, op. 86, Phantasiestücke, op. 117; Joachim: Variations, op. 10; Dvořák: Romance, op. 11 . Patricia McCarty, viola; Eric Larsen, piano. Ashmont Music 1012. All the music in this CD stems from composers from Brahms’s circle of personal and professional acquaintances. Both Robert Fuchs and Antonín Dvořák were among the promising younger com posers that Brahms recommended to his publisher, Simrock, and Joseph Joachim was, of course, a life long friend. If Fuchs’s music can’t quite emerge from beneath the great man’s shadow, there are certainly worse shadows to be under! His Sonata, written in 1899, faithfully observes the time-honored conven tions of the sonata form, calling to mind the much quoted compliment Brahms paid to his younger col league: “Fuchs is a splendid musician; everything is so fine and so skillful, so charmingly invented, that one is always pleased.” The Phantasiestücke date from 1927 (the year of Fuchs’s death) but look even fur ther back: the theme of the concluding variations wouldn’t be out of place in a Mozart sonata. Although he also uses traditional forms, Joseph Joachim is too much his own man to be anyone’s epigone. Variations on an Original Theme is one of two viola compositions he wrote in 1854 (the other being Hebrew Melodies , op. 9). Both are important contributions to the repertoire that deserve to be much better known. The fiery Hungarian Joachim unashamedly shows his roots even when varying a chorale-like theme (two of the variations are indeed marked “Gypsy” and “Hungarian”). In a detailed commentary of the composition, Schumann con cluded that it is “one of the greatest of masterpieces.”

Prokofiev: Suite from Romeo and Juliet , arranged by Vadim Borisovsky . Matthew Jones, viola; Rivka Golani, viola; Michael Hampton, piano. Naxos 8.572318. Matthew Jones has written in detail about his dis covery and research of Vadim Borisovsky’s transcrip tions from Prokofiev’s ballet Romeo and Juliet for viola and piano in the Fall 2011 issue of JAVS (“A Labor of Love: Borisovsky’s Romeo and Juliet Transcriptions,” vol. 27, no. 2, 29–40), so I can refer the interested reader to that article for the back ground to this comprehensive recording. The present CD includes the thirteen movements that Borisovsky arranged at different periods, plus two movements adapted from David Grunes’s transcrip tions for violin or cello, and one more arranged by the performers themselves in the same spirit. The result is an hour of music including most of the famous motifs from this well-loved score. Jones and Hampton, aka The Bridge Duo, bring plenty of vari ety to their performance, so that any risk of monoto ny is avoided, at least for this violistically-biased pair of ears. Although he doesn’t always keep to Borisovky’s admittedly idiosyncratic fingering choic es, Jones masters the inordinate technical demands of these transcriptions most successfully, with just a very occasional lowering of the guard during some obnoxious octaves. The tempo for “Juliet as a young Girl” is cautiously moderate, but every note is in place. As, by the way, they are in Jones’s own tran scription of “Death of Tybalt,” which is taken at a breakneck pace. Only in this movement did I feel that the viola-and-piano medium was just not enough to do justice to Prokofiev’s cataclysmic cli maxes. Did Borisovsky feel the same when he kept his hands off it? A more resonant acoustic might have helped, too: the sound is beautifully focused but a tad on the dry side (nothing to worry about, though). Rivka Golani puts in a welcome cameo

Antonín Dvořák’s Romance was, of course, originally written for violin and orchestra, and I’m afraid it

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