JAVS Spring 2022

With Viola in Hand

The Campagnoli Project: The Odyssey of Recording all 41 Caprices for Viola by Kristina Giles

Bartolomeo Campagnoli’s 41 Caprices for the Viola are an enigma. Too short to perform on a recital, too difficult for many younger players, and too musical to be used as etudes, they nevertheless have become a technical study for more advanced students. A rite of passage in any serious student’s repertoire, they tend not to make it out of the practice room. I had my rite of passage in high school and learned a couple of Caprices—admittedly, very imperfectly. I didn’t understand them fully, and they frustrated me. Still, there was something intriguing about that book. I brought the 41 Caprices for Viola to conservatory, and it continued to accompany me as I made my way through grad school, orchestra auditions, and gigs. About once a year, I would flip through the pages and attempt to read through a few caprices. And every time I would get frustrated with their difficulty, realize there was no point in wasting my practice time on them, and put the book away. In 2013, I had recently finished my Doctorate, and was teaching a wonderful studio of middle and high school-aged violists in Poughkeepise. Following in the footsteps of my own teachers, I had assigned a caprice, no. 22, to one of my high schoolers. She came back the next week, unsure of how to play it. The memory of my demonstration the last week was gone and there were no recordings of the piece anywhere. I played the caprice for her again. I offered to send a recording of myself playing it, for reference during the week. On my drive back home that night, I thought about how the absence of Campagnoli’s Caprices was a fantastic gap in the canon of recorded viola literature. Perhaps a famous violist would eventually make an album. I sent my student a recording the next day and became newly aware of the many challenges of Caprice no. 22.

Like many musicians, I have obsessive-compulsive/loyalist tendencies that draw me to daunting projects, and once I have committed, I cannot back out. Over the next few days, the idea to record just Caprice no. 22 turned into an idea to record all 41 caprices: on video, as a reference for others like my student. I talked to a few friends about the idea, and they thought it was cool. They also probably thought I was insane: I was about 8 months pregnant with my first child. After the birth of my daughter, and probably predictably to my friends, this Everest of an idea took a back seat to the intense ride that is new parenting. For about a year, I gained my footing after many sleepless nights with a newborn and being fully occupied with my daughter at all hours of the day, save for when I had help from my husband, or teaching and performing “breaks.” Parenthood also gave me a new perspective on time. I had wasted so many hours before, when time felt infinite. Now, taking advantage of any and every free minute, I experienced a new sense of urgency about what I wanted to accomplish. I did a little research and found that no one else had taken on the Caprices. Surely, I felt there must be many other students out there like mine, who practiced these pieces for lessons but had no little or no frame of reference for how they actually sound. Almost exactly a year after my daughter was born, I started on the project in earnest. The thing was, I was still daunted by most of the caprices in the book. So, I decided to start with the two that I could get excited about: Caprices no. 17—a theme and variations—and no. 33—a short fugue. No. 17 is the most famous, judging by the fact that it’s one of the only caprices with multiple recordings out on YouTube. It is approachable, and one of the only longer caprices with substance to be a candidate for a recital program. It was also the only

Journal of the American Viola Society / Vol. 38, No. 1, Spring 2022

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