JAVS Spring 2020

In 2009, Dr. Selleck and I were invited to perform at the 30 th anniversary of the founding (by me) of the Canadian Viola Society. Along with Kathy Rapoport, Professor of Viola at the University of Toronto, and her accompanist Carolyn Jones, we performed a programme titled “Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Two”. The “Something Old”, naturally, was the concerto. The event took place at L’Université de Montréal and was organized by then-president Jutta Puchammer-Sedillot. It was a premiere of an 18 th Century concerto in 2009! The concerto itself is quite typical of the period of flux between the Baroque and Classical periods. It’s in the usual fast-slow-fast pattern of the time. In the original version, the first movement opens with a 15-measure theme played first by the strings and echoed by the horn soloist; in Wascher’s transcription, the soloist starts right away, beginning with a descending broken octave figure and doubling the violin an octave lower. There’s a short development section and recapitulation, with a second inversion dominant chord indicating where a cadenza would be inserted, and finally a short coda. The second movement is a lovely aria da capo. Similar to the first movement, the horn part starts four measures after the strings in the original, whereas the viola plays along the entire time in Wascher’s transcription. The third movement, though short, is a romp which demands a virtuoso performance on either instrument. Wascher’s transcription cuts off seventeen measures of accompaniment at the end. I wrote new cadenzas for each of the three movements— there were no written cadenzas with the original manuscript, of course. At the time the common practice was to improvise your own, sadly a pretty much lost art today. It was hard to resist a reference to Thomas Arne’s “Rule, Brittania” right at the start of the last cadenza; if that doesn’t suit your taste, by all means feel free to write your own. In June of 2018, I vacationed to Europe with my son Karl, and I took the opportunity to present the updated work to the Assistant Music Librarian at SLUB: two complete sets of scores, orchestral parts and viola solo, as well as Dr. Selleck’s piano reduction.

Figure 3. The author (left) presenting the score of the concerto to SLUB music librarian Miriam Roner (right).

And so, finally, I am able to offer for sale the music for the Concerto for Viola in E Flat by J. G. Knechtel – transcribed, arranged, printed and with three original cadenzas by A. Baird Knechtel. Please contact baird. knechtel@gmail.com and find out for yourself what made this concerto—originally for horn—so attractive to the great Australian French horn virtuoso, Barry Tuckwell, that he included it as the first selection on his double CD (475-47631 for Decca Records). It’s got my name on it, and of course I would love for you to play and enjoy it as much as I have enjoyed seeing this project through to completion. Baird Knechtel was a violist, educator, and founder and first president of the Canadian Viola Society. He taught for over forty years at high schools in Toronto, and performed frequently in the Toronto area. Please see page 6 for a remembrance of Mr. Knechtel.

Notes

1 “History of the Corno da Caccia (French Horn),” Douglas Myers, http://www.dougmyersmusic.com/ Microsoft_Word_-_History_of_the_Corno_da_Caccia. pdf.

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Journal of the American Viola Society / Vol. 36, No. 1, Spring 2020