It’s late autumn — viola time.
The viola ought to maybe be the instrument of summer time. Its tone suggests luxurious ripeness from the highest of its vary to backside. However falling between the violin’s hovering brilliance and the cello’s corporeality, the viola additionally signifies transition. Toru Takemitsu referred to as his tender, mistily opaque viola concerto “Ring Round Autumn.” By recognizing the solo instrument as a conveyor of stock-taking, it colours darkly, evoking altering leaves and sundown.
Final week, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Colburn Faculty and MOCA independently hopped on the fall-harvesting viola bandwagon. On high of that, one of many season’s most alluring new recordings is of Morton Feldman’s “The Viola in My Life,” by considered one of in the present day’s main violists, Antoine Tamestit.
The actual shock of the week was that, of their chamber music sequence, the L.A. Phil, LACO and Colburn all programmed a number of of Brahms’ seldom-heard string quintets and/or string sextets. Brahms wasn’t the primary to juice up the string quartet with a second violin. Mozart’s late string quintets (typically referred to as viola quintets) demonstrated the heavenly richness that an additional viola brings to the string quartet. However Brahms took the subsequent step in his quintets (with doubled violas) and sextets (additionally double cellos) including his rhapsodically “Brahmsian” plush, soul-warming thickened textures.
The L.A. Phil started viola week with a Tuesday night program, “Brahms Strings,” as a part of the orchestra’s chamber music sequence at Walt Disney Live performance Corridor that included the blazing early First Sextet and late, luminously serene Second Quintet. As a part of its chamber music sequence throughout the road within the Colburn Faculty’s Zipper Corridor, Saturday, LACO coincidentally held “A Brahmsian Affair,” on this case that includes each the sextets. Including to the coincidence, the Colburn Faculty had programmed Sunday in its smaller Thayer Corridor, Brahms’ First String Quintet as a part of considered one of its chamber music applications.
It didn’t fairly prove that Brahmsians would have the uncommon likelihood of a full survey of the quintets and sextets downtown over six days. Colburn wound up substituting Brahms Piano Trio No. 2 — no violas. However the faculty made up for it Saturday throughout a day-long MOCA seminar relating South Korean artist Haegue Yang’s 2024 set up work, “Star-Crossed Rendezvous after Yun,” which will likely be on view in March, to the music of Isang Yun. The seminar included a efficiency of the Korean composer’s 1988 “Contemplation,” for 2 violas, performed with gripping meditative depth by latest Colburn graduate, Lan Cao, and present conservatory pupil, Ran Tae.
What goes with Brahms is all the time an excellent query, and each the L.A. Phil and LACO set the stage with one thing trendy. At Disney, that was Jessie Montgomery’s folk-style brief 2008 string quartet, “Strum,” demonstrating the extraordinary vibrancy of a plucked viola string. A violin pizzicato is sharp, reducing. A cello’s has the aura of a bass drum. The viola feels like a heartbeat heard by a stethoscope. When the autumnal Second Quintet started, the 2 eloquent Philharmonic violas have been able to stealthily underscore a piece of profound lyric restraint. Within the second half, an early twentieth century oddball fantasia for 4 violas by British composer/violist York Bowen was preceded a gripping efficiency of the First Sextet.
Members of Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra carry out Brahms’ String Sextet No. 1 at Colburn Faculty Zipper Corridor on Nov. 22.
(Elizabeth Asher Images / Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra)
LACO’s sextet program additionally went in reverse order, the second sextet heard earlier than the primary. Brahms was 27 and 32 when he wrote them. The primary captivates by way of a younger man’s earnest effusiveness; the second’s effusiveness, tainted by lovelorn glum, deepens.
LACO additionally commissioned a younger L.A. composer, Julia Moss, to write down her personal string sextet in tribute to pianist and composer Sarah Gibson, whose tragic dying at 38 from most cancers final yr devastated the L.A. new music group. Moss (who’s a yr youthful than the Brahms of the First Sextet) ready for the Brahms with “(Please Don’t) Look Away.” Amid unsettling small sounds, sliding tones, long-held pitches and well-plucked heartbeat strings, the violas, of their middle-way vary and method, saved the stability.
LACO boasts however two violas in its ensemble, and so they mattered. This time towards the massive moments of melody that Brahms assigns violin and cello, LACO’s principal violist, Yura Lee, dramatically revealed how bits of Brahms’ messy soul additionally discovered its voice within the viola.
The truth is, this can be one purpose why Brahms’ solely solo music for viola was an alternate model he made from his two clarinet sonatas composed close to the tip of his life. In 1986, the L.A. Phil commissioned Luciano Berio to write down a concerto for its famous principal clarinetist Michele Zukovsky, and Berio responded by orchestrating the piano a part of Brahms’ Clarinet Sonata No. 1, turning it into an interesting clarinet concerto.
Following in Brahms’ footsteps, Berio additionally made a model for viola and orchestra. The clarinet concerto, which he titled “Op. 120, No. 1” (the opus variety of Brahms’ sonata), is broadly performed and has been recorded a number of instances. The viola model is stunningly stunning but by no means recorded and stays virtually unknown. Berio, who was arguably the best twentieth century Italian composer after Puccini, had a particular really feel for the viola as a solo instrument. The a hundredth anniversary of Berio’s start was in October. What are violists and orchestras (the L.A., specifically, with this feather in its cap) ready for? Each variations on the identical program could be even higher than one.
On our shores, considered one of America’s most vital composers, Morton Feldman, occurred to be born lower than three months after Berio and he was a viola man too. A viola haunts his best-known work, “Rothko Chapel,” which like “The Viola in My Life” is from the early Seventies, the latter telling the story of Feldman’s infatuation with the instrument (and a violist) in 4 actions of ethereal subtlety.
“I didn’t select the viola for its repertory,” Tamestit writes within the notes to the recording, “I selected it for its sound.”
He’s not the one one, and also you don’t should be a violist. Nor does viola-love finally know a season.
