JAVS Spring 2013

adventurous composer). Never mind, the three sonatas included are great fun, especially when played as brilliantly as they are here. The three unac companied “Exercises” are more interesting than their name suggests, being in the spirit of Paganini’s more melodious caprices, albeit tailor-made for the viola. This is a very attractive, beautifully played taster of Rolla’s copious production. Manto and Madrigals . Duos for violin and viola by Killius, Scelsi, Holliger, Bartók, Skalkottas, Davies, Martinů, Nied. Thomas Zehetmair, violin; Ruth Killius, viola. ECM New Series 2150. 476 3827. The one more-or-less well-known piece in this adventurous selection of music for violin and viola is the title-giving Three Madrigals by Bohuslav Martinů, written in 1947 for the brother-and-sister team of Joseph and Lillian Fuchs. They are per formed here by a husband-and-wife duo with a bril liant virtuosity that, however, lacks that ultimate identification with the music’s syntax, which is apparently the sole preserve of Czech players (Jiří Novák and Milan Škampa from the Smetana Quartet remain unbeatable in this work). No such reserves apply to the rest of the program, which has in part been written for the present players, who per form it with unshakeable technical aplomb and a remarkably wide tonal palette. Heinz Holliger’s Three Sketches from 2006 were ini tially commissioned as an encore to be played after Mozart’s Sinfonia concertante , and they accordingly employ that piece’s scordatura tuning for the viola. In any event, their harmonic language makes them somewhat unconventional for that purpose, but the three short movements are fascinating explorations of, respectively, natural harmonics, rhythmic intrica cies, and polyphony. In the third movement, titled Cantique à six voix , both players are required to con tribute their summing voices to make up a six-part texture. A similar device was used by Giacinto Scelsi in Manto for unaccompanied viola (written in 1957), in which the player impersonates the eponymous Greek

prophetess. The Greek composer Nikos Skalkottas wrote his Duo in 1938 after studying with Arnold Schoenberg in Berlin, as the intricate language of its three compact movements shows. Aural relief from this demanding repertoire is provid ed by Peter Maxwell Davies’s Midhouse Air , a piece inspired by Orkney Islands fiddling; by Bartók’s forty-four-second student prank in which both play ers perform from the same part, one of them reading it backward (the piece’s autograph manuscript is reproduced in the booklet); by Johannes Nied’s three-note rhythmic obstacle course, Zugabe (Encore); and by Rainer Killius’s setting of—of all things—an Icelandic drinking song. Recording quali ty and presentation are well up to the label’s usual, sophisticated standards. Kurtág: Signs, Games, and Messages; Ligeti: Sonata . Kim Kashkashian, viola. ECM New Series 2240. 476 4729. The brightest musical highlight of last year’s interna tional viola congress at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New york, was for me Kim Kashkashian’s performance of the complete Signs, Games, and Messages by György Kurtág (b. 1926). This is a continuing series of isolated movements written—and continually revised—by that post Webernian miniaturist during the past quarter centu ry (two of them date from as far back as 1961). None of these movements surpasses the five-minute mark, with most being roughly around one minute in length. Kashkashian has lived with this music for decades, and the notoriously fastidious composer has indeed revised several movements with her in mind. At Eastman, she played the nineteen pieces in chrono logical order, dividing them into several blocks, between which she illuminatingly commented on the pieces’ genesis, their position within Kurtág’s œuvre , and the evolution of the composer’s style. For this recording, she has devised a performance order that springs back and forth in time, providing a nicely contrasting sequence of roughly thirty minutes.

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