Links for my students: contemporary virtuosity

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qYqi-EMErU

metallica orion solo ca. 3:00

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MP1cO948Ek

rodrigo & gabriela solo ca. 2:35

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHW1HCrMFpI&playnext=1&list=PL394706BE865CC2DC&feature=results_main

patkop intro 5:00 crin 9:00

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbBw03Q_3zw

leila josefowicz salonen

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvAh91_5jjc

hilary hahn & hauschka

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuw0uThploM

janine jansen Dubugnon

A new column: Sorry, I can't review my friends, but here's what I really thought (Part I)

In German, the word "prima" is used to mean: fan-fucking-tastic. I first listened to this CD in Berlin recently, and I gotta say, Prima are "prima": from the first look at their cover photo - what chamber music could result from any other country than the U.S.A., with that diversity of ethnic faces and hipness in the styling department? (Nice balance of white and black outfits, by the way).

And what chamber music DOES result from this young American trio based in New York, the capital of interesting music definitely of the U.S., maybe the world (sorry, Berlin, but you just don't mach up in contemporary music - although you've got classical music nailed).

Since I've decided to try and write like an ex-critic, which I am, I'm going to try and feel my way through how I really thought and felt about this CD.

 

First of all, Schickele. Schickele? I mean it's fun music and all, but risky to put in position 1 on your debut CD, guys.

Khachaturian: this caught my ear. Beautiful, full-blooded playing. Gulia's shifts are not always perfect, but then, neither are mine. Lately I've come to understand and accept more and more that the kind of technical security that would guarantee shifts entails an investment of one's humanity away from one's musical feeling, i.e. a sacrifice I personally have never been able of willing to make. (This, by the way, was a law passed by the Violin Gods. Surpassed only by Heifetz.) You come across so much as a person in your playing, Gulia. I heard and felt your warmth, your gift. 

I enjoyed the Milhaud - part of this exists in a Violin Duo version, right? 

You see? I could never write such things in a "review"! But really, this is what I would want to say to her: complimenti. 

I think that anyone worldwide looking for a recording of any of these pieces would feel it was a good introduction to the pieces as musical works and really come to love them. 

I understand and totally support the culture on which the primacy of works is predicated - we musicians are interpreters who bring past masterpieces to life.

I live this culture - my income as a classical violinist depends on society valuing Shostakovich quartets, or Beethoven symphonies, or Dvorak's Rusalka, in live performance.

My worry is that this culture is becoming obsolete. And it really bothers me, for 2 reasons: 1) there is a lot of really great contemporary classical music out there, but there's also a whole lotta great other kinds of music out there (and we gotta compete with that? We gotta be at our "coolest" when we are being quoted by Bjork?) and 2) my deep down feeling is that the Golden Age of Western Music has passed by now, along with the Golden Age of Western Civilization. But more about that another time...

I wonder if you started with Schickele because you knew to end with Piazzolla and then... where else to put Schickele? (Position 3 might have been an option.)

I loved the Piazzolla: sassy. It also boldly disregarded the relevance of categorizations like "classical" and "non-classical" maybe. Gulia, here your solo, one that I became familiar with listening to Gidon Kremer, was truly brought alive. Wow, Sasha's a lucky man!! And R. is a lucky little girl!

I can't really comment on the piano or clarinet playing since I'm no expert but from a violinist's point of view I'd say that if my ears don't lie I would love to play chamber music with you both too. 

Lately I have had the pleasure of working in a new string quartet configuration. The process of discovering each other musically and in relation to Shostakovich (# 3 and #13, wow, amazing pieces) has reminded me of the great joys and personal reality checks of being a chamber musician.

This quality of being a chamber musician really comes across in Prima's playing on this CD. I just hope I can play as much to my own potential as a chamber musician this Sunday at the Kollwitz Museum with 3 amazing musicians who... well, I so wish we could all get together for an evening of chamber music sometime. 

 

[... written last week, as Part I of a multi-part series, I hope?]

Favorite violinists

Over the years I've come to treasure certain violinists for their interpretations of particular repertoire, either live or on recordings. For me they somehow "fit" - as if they owned the work. Here's my Top 10:

1. Janine Jansen's Britten Concerto (with Daniel Harding and the Berlin Phil).
2. Christian Tetzlaff's Berg Concerto with the Berlin Phil, where he played Bach as an encore.
3. Gidon Kremer's Erlkonig.
4. Thomas Zehetmair's Mendelssohn Concerto.
5. Thomas Zehetmair's Ysaye Ballade.
6. PatKop's Crin.
7. Heifetz's Korngold Concerto.
8. Alexander Markov's Paganini.
9. Philippe Quint's Red Violin Caprices.
10. James Ehnes's Barber Concerto with the Philadelphia Orchestra.

2 of the above violinists have my favorite quartet recordings: Tetzlaff Quartet (Schoenberg 1) and Zehetmair Quartet (Schumann).

I've yet to find my ideal Sibelius Concerto. Rotten Tomatoes award goes to Tetzlaff for his Tchaikovsky Concerto with the San Francisco Symphony. Special mention: Aleksey Igudesman for outstanding comic genius.

Who are your favorites?

New Year's Resolution 2012: "Baby Steps to Virtuosity"

Bill Murray once made a movie "Was ist mit Bob?" (in the German version) where he plays a multiphobic personality coached by his psychotherapist into taking "baby steps" to confront each small problem with the aim of overcoming bigger ones. For 2012 I decided to take baby steps on the violin to achieve if not virtuosity then a kind of fluency. For the first six days of January, I would take one Bach Solo Partita or Sonata and play it through at the end of my practice session.

Well, it's January 6, folks, and I did it! I'm humbled by the fact that I still don't know the C-major fugue from memory (nor have I achieved the perfect fingering for those killer parallel fifths, F/B-flat... is there one?) but I'm in awe of Bach's genius and the meditative perfection of these works.

Now I'm wondering if I can manage all 6 Ysaye Sonatas in the first six days of 2013... something to work towards? (Not to mention the first 24 days of 2014... hahaha).

Wishing all devoted violinists out there a happy year of productive practising and following to unimaginable lengths our craft, our art, our four-stringed hearts.

Coming Soon: Heavy Metal Violin

I am going to be sharing a new article soon about the current popular-culture incarnation of violin heroism invoking and recycling the tropes of heavy metal. KEYWORDS:
*stunt violin, acrobatic violin
*reality show violinists
*gender & sexuality tropes in "performance heroism" (violin: guitar)
*nationalism, Americana, appropriation of an ancient Italian instrument to a recent American musical genre
*heavy metal and Baroque music, stylistic affinities between ~, Walser Redux

Shmuel Ashkenasi's Paganini

The first blog post of the new year comes in response to the total inspiration that is Israeli violinist Shmuel Ashkenasi (b. 1941). Having recently met a former pupil of his who raved about him, I listened to his recording of Paganini's Concertos 1 & 2 (with the Vienna Symphony under Heribert Esser, 1969). Wow. WOW! How can this recording have slipped under the radar of someone authoring a Paganini book for so many years? During that time I have been listening to Salvatore Accardo, Alexander Markov, and Shlomo Mintz (whose recording of the 24 Caprices I grew up with). I would rate Ashkenasi as up there with those ultra-Paganinians - in fact he studied with Ilona Feher, the teacher of Mintz - because he has a quality to his playing that makes you go, "well, that is just ridiculous." I could practise for a million years and still not play those double harmonics like he does. Or downbow staccato. Or ricochet. He also manages to deliver Paganini's music *as music*, somehow -- and not just as a technical exercise. I'm wondering how I can get to hear him live... and wish for violinists everywhere a fantastic year of feeling as blown away as I do right now. Happy 2012, everyone!

Revisiting concerto dynamics

A recent conversation with a Berlin freelancer friend got me thinking once again about concerto dynamics. Without naming names, this friend of mine was describing a certain attitude he observed in a top orchestra - whereby the musicians attained the highest level of playing by, well, terrorizing each other. These musicians are like sharks, he said, just waiting to pounce if you made a mistake. It was basically a communal scare tactic, driving up the standard of playing by provocation, by instilling fear, by maintaining constant and intense pressure.

This disheartens me. Excellence in an orchestra can come out of mutual support and cameraderie, rather than out of such negative dynamics.

When a soloist is playing with an excellent orchestra, the ideal performance is one in which they *lift* each other - in which a healthy rivalry or a competitive edge can play a productive role.

But if the orchestra produces its virtuosity by means of mutual psychological torture, how can their "challenge" to the soloist rise above, well, bullying?

It's ten years since I finished my Ph.D. dissertation on solo-tutti dynamics in violin concertos and I'm still finding unanswered questions on the topic....

Jonas Kaufmann

I've been wanting to hear Jonas Kaufmann for ages. His recordings of Schubert Lieder and Carmen, arias with Abbado, etc. had piqued my interest. Tonight he sang at the Berlin Philharmonie with the Staatskapelle Berlin and the Staatsopernchor: Liszt's »Der 13. Psalm«
für Tenor, Chor und Orchester. I was way up in the nose-bleeds but even there I could hear 2 things. A magnificent voice, even more thrilling live than in recordings (just as I'd hoped). And a terrible piece! Wow, was Liszt hit/miss as a composer or what?

But back to the voice: it is rich. It penetrates. It carries. It has colors. All of this I had expected, and I was not disappointed. But the overriding impression I was left with was that Kaufmann's voice is an instrument and behind it is an intelligent musician. High praise for, like, a singer!

He got 5 curtain calls. It was clear the audience (a full house) had shown up especially to see him. I'll bet Kaufmann was glad to leave a Berlin stage without injury (this summer at the Waldbühne he was bitten by Anna Netrebko after an impassioned duet).

Janine Wildhage & Christophe Landon Rare Violins Exhibition

Janine Wildhage and Christophe Landon have a violin workshop in Berlin Mitte where they make violins and sell old Italian instruments. At last night's "Einweihungsfeier und Ausstellung," they threw a party to inaugurate their new exhibition of beautiful violins, old and new. Armenian virtuoso Mikhail Simonyan showed off his Landon Guarneri copy with a performance of "Armenian Prayer" and Ysaye No. 3. It had a gorgeous sound and a vast range of colors, which Simonyan brought out with a bow so spongy it could have been a bass bow. Having played another of Landon's Guarneri copies the day after he finished it back in New York, I could hear that Simonyan's years-long relationship with his had deepened and ripened its sound. His playing was confident and polished with lots of nice interpretive details and an unusual degree of bow control at the point.

After a few glasses of wine some of the people gathered started to pick violins up off the tables and play a few bars of Bach or Tchaikovsky. There were members of the Berlin Philharmonic there -- earlier in the day they had rehearsed with Nikolaj Znaider, who had, coincidentally, also visited Landon at the workshop that same day. Znaider is due to play Sibelius with the Berlin Philharmonic later this week (review to follow).

West-Eastern Divan Orchestra / Daniel Barenboim. Beethoven Symphonies Nos. 8 & 9 at the Berlin Waldbühne (21 August 2011)

1. The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra rocks. The string sections have a totally distinctive, aurally identifiable character that is not American, not European, but… well, Israeli-Palestinian, I suppose. As a side-note: it’s unusual these days to see any orchestra, anywhere, without any Asians

2. The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra and Beethoven’s 9^th: an orchestra and a symphony that were made for each other.

3. How cool is Daniel Barenboim? More on his “Mahlerian” approach to Beethoven to come in my review for Strings Magazine. It’s like he’s like a wave and the musicians can ride on his energy. At the climax of the 9^th slow movement you could hear him grunting.

4. I’ve never seen an outdoor summer concert audience as well-behaved as these 20,000 Berliners (including President Christian Wulff)

5. The “Ode to Joy” comes over the loudspeaker-system as the Nazi architecture of the Olympia Stadion towers nearby.

Geigengeschichten...

There are not that many published stories about the origins and mystery of old violins: Albert Berr's _Geigengeschichten_ is one of them. Prof. Otterstedt at the Musikinstrumentmuseum put me onto it. It's the kind of book that makes me wish my German was better. It is full of storieslike the time Carl Flesch's Strad was stolen, or about the powers of a Tarantelgeiger who could cure spider bites by playing. The paucity of violin literature is not an accurate reflection of the degree of fascination that the topic holds. It is one aspect of classical music culture that regularly makes it into the headlines (Strads left in cabs or train stations) and was even turned into a film ("The Red Violin"). My current research topic being the "aura" of Cremonese instruments, I have been especially interested to follow the case of the fraudulent Geigenbauer Dietmar Machold. The "Madoff of the violin" has made a career swindling banks (and people) of millions of euros under the pretence of dealing in genuine Strads. He used his knowledge and skill to buy a castle and a yellow sports car. I, on the other hand, just write articles about Strads.

The Machold case gives me pause for thought. Here's a guy who took advantage of rarified knowledge -- few people in the world have the expertise to authenticate Stradivaris -- and he would have gotten away with it were it not for honest members of that small circle coming forward. Cheating the banks is one thing but he cheated countless musicians out of their life savings as well.

I'm gonna stick to writing the articles. And playing the Strads too, of course!

Gertrude Clarke Whittall

Gertrude Clarke Whittall (1867-1965): I only came across her name because the Paganini collection at the Library of Congress Music Section is named after her. Her name is all over my footnotes and references, yet I never knew who she was or even what she looked like. Recently when I was going through Boris Schwarz's books, I came across a book by William Dana Orcutt called. The Stradivari Memorial at Washington, the National Capital (NY: Da Capo Press, 1977). Opposite p. 20, who should I find but Gertrude Clarke Whittall, pictured in 1907. Who was this mysterious benefactress and what was her role in getting all those priceless Paganini materials to Washington, D.C.?

Boris Schwarz, Patricia Schwarz

Boris Schwarz was my kind of musicologist. More specifically, he was a violinist. He knew Menuhin, Flesch, and Stern. His father was Leopold Auer's pianist. Schwarz's book _Great Masters of the Violin_ (1983) remains *the* go-to book for information about the greatest violinists from Vivaldi to Perlman. When Schwarz died, shortly after the book's publication, the world lost its greatest authority on violinists and violin playing.
Recently I had the unexpected pleasure of meeting Patricia Schwarz, his widow, in midtown Manhattan. She is a lovely woman who is still active in bringing young Israeli musicians to the U.S. (among them Gil Shaham) and takes an interest in talented Chinese musicians (e.g. Jian Wang). She let me loose in her late husband's personal library. In a score of Beethoven Sonatas presented to the young Boris, I found the following inscription:

"Our greatest violinist, Joseph Joachim,
recently made the following statement:
If I do not practise one day, I notice it,
if I miss three days of practice, my friends notice it,
but if I miss eight practice days, the public notices.
Heed these words, little Boba, and you will surely achieve something worthwhile one day in
the realm of art."

[With thanks to my friend Thomas S. for help with the translation.]

The inscription is signed "Grunewald 1914" by a Julius Sennet or Seunet -- a violinist, I would guess. I'm still trying to figure out who he was while I work my way through the bibliographic minefield I found in Professor Schwarz's collection.

PatKop, Fazil Say, and multi-kulti Berlin

I took down my last post, on violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja, because I ended up using some of it for my review on the Strings Magazine website:

http://smtemp.mugo.ca/Reviews/Performances/The-Crazy-Genius-of-Violinist-Patricia-Kopatchinskaja

(The title is my editor's, not mine!)

I wanted to pick up though on another strand of thought that emerged from my reviewing this performance, which was, after all, only part of an entire musical evening devoted to celebrating the incredible talent of Fazil Say.

A Turkish musician. In Berlin. An audience dominated by the bourgeois crème of the Berlin Turkish population. Not your usual Philharmonie crowd, nor the folks you see ambling down Kottbusser Damm.

So my thoughts are already turning idly to what it must mean for a musician like Say to be playing in Berlin for this audience (before PatKop comes out and, like, alters my violin-reality).

It’s not until Say, Kopatchinskaja, and percussionist Burhan Öçal play Mozart’s Rondo alla Turca -- in a wacky, jazzy arrangement (by Say) -- that it hits me: they are reappropriating Hapsburg “Turca” as modern-day “Turkei” for the hip Berliner.

Say, speaking in heavily accented German, poked gentle fun at Öçal, an actor from Turkey famous for playing gangsters in mafia movies (that figures, with his dark looks) as introductory banter before they went on to play a funked up improvisation on Turkish folk music in 10/8 meter that would probably have let those Silk Road Project guys drooling.

Now, I’m no identity-politics-musicologist, and even if were, I’d probably still struggle to form a coherent sentence out of the following keywords: postmodern Mozart -- Turkey – Globalization – Musical Identity – Islam -- Post-Race-World.

I mean, here’s a guy who has reclaimed Scheherazade with his “1,001 Nights in the Harem” Violin Concerto: turning the exoticization element of Orientalism on its head.

This point will probably be lost on Americans who may not know that “Orientalisch” in Berlin can describe anything from chow mein to bellydance.

What’s most admirable about Say though is that he is only unwittingly contributing to the “music & politics” debate. His relaxed demeanor and humor said it all: after a program of seriously wacky music, he introduced the encore as “ein ganz normales stück … von Beethoven” [“a totally normal piece… by Beethoven”], then proceeded to play Für Elise. For a few measures, that is, before Kopatchinskaja, and Öçal joined in and all hell broke loose.

Joachim Quartet Berlin

The Joseph Joachim Quartet, founded by the great Geiger himself, is still going strong. In its latest incarnation its members are all faculty at the Universität der Künste in Berlin: violinists Viviane Hagner and Latica Honda-Rosenberg, violist Hartmut Rohde, and cellist Jens Peter Maintz. On May 29 at the UdK Joseph-Joachim-Konzertsaal they presented an ingenious program of 2+4 : 2+4 (Mozart + Ravel) – by which I mean they played a Mozart Quartet (the incredible late quartet in B flat, K.589) and the formidable Ravel Violin-Cello Duo in the first half, and the gorgeous Mozart Violin-Viola Duo in B-flat and Ravel's unique Quartet in the second. Symmetrical programming. Equal division of labor. Genius.

All four members are extremely accomplished players. They gave polished performances with plenty of style and natural, unforced musicality -- an absolute pleasure to listen to. The second and fourth movements of the Ravel quartet were taken at hair-raising speed but without necessitating technical compromises. These four play well together, and it was hardly believable that it was their first performance as a quartet. That said, I was not the only person in the audience who noticed that amidst excellence, there was one star who really shone: the cellist. I first saw Mainz as a chamber musician partnering with Janine Jansen at the Kammermusiksaal. She is a top-level soloist and he entirely held his own in such august company. I’m excited to see the current configuration of the Joachim Quartet again – maybe they will even play music by Brahms, Joachim’s erstwhile "BFF."

Piecing Together the Story of a Strad… A follow-up to: "You can hold the Strad but you can’t play it" (May 4, 2011)

Rudolf Ernst Pliverics (1878-1964) was a Berlin violin maker and the co-author, with Albert Fuchs, of Taxe Der Streichinstrumente (Musikverlag F. Hofmeister, 1978).

George Schlieps (1894-1977) was a Russian-born German violin maker (he was the nephew of Alexander Glazunov) who worked in Helsinki, Stockholm, Estonia, Berlin, and England before immigrating to New York City in 1950. He and his son Armin worked for Rembert Wurlitzer and then opened their own shop. Armin Schlieps (1931-2005) was a bow maker who subsequently moved to Seattle and ran his own shop there.

The 1703 Strad now held at the Berlin Music Instrument Museum (Catalogue Number 4467) came into George Schlieps’s hands during WW2 according to Pliverics. He noted also that it had undergone multiple repairs and that the top had been replaced.

Schlieps lived in Berlin from 1944 till 1947 repairing violins. Who gave him the Strad? Where did it come from?

Museum records show only that the violin entered its collection in Charlottenburg, a predecessor of the present building next to the Philharmonie, on October 9, 1956. By then Schlieps was settled in New York.

Between 1947 and 1956 the violin was supposedly played by members of the Berlin Philharmonie, but we don't know who.

It was lovingly restored by Olga Adelmann (1913-2000) and subjected to a number of authentication tests. Dr. Annette Otterstedt, the musicologist who worked closely with Adelmann, provided me with all the known documentation concerning the violin. An expert on the Alemannic School [Die Alemannische Schule] of violin making (as well as being a keen gamba player), Otterstedt contends that the Cremona School was an aberration, not the Ur-School, of violin making—and that German craftsmanship was in fact much more prevalent and influential than has ever been acknowledged before by violin historians.

Otterstedt, who trained with the late Carl Dahlhaus, embodies an enviable synthesis of musicology and organology that is inspiring to me personally. Her research into, and championing of, Alemannic instruments is valuable on its own merits but also for deemphasizing and defetishizing Cremona instruments.

A Berlin Geigenbauer told me recently that he gets at least a few calls every week from strangers who have supposedly found long-lost Strads in their attics. He is good-natured but gets annoyed by all this.

The genius mythology surrounding Stradivari is a Romantic invention—he wasn’t “Beethovenified” until Fétis’s hagiographical biography came out in 1856—and it’s important to recognize that this inflated view of the man originated in a later era.

Even as we strive to cultivate historiographical awareness, though, we are faced with this tangible object, an instrument from early in his “Golden Period,” which poses real questions for us.

Alex Ross has recently published a series of beautiful essays and blog posts demystifying Wagner the gargantuan cultural icon by focusing on a few bars from Die Walküre, Act III. By keeping it real, and focussed, he arrives at a new understanding of Wagner’s greatness, stripped of heavy baggage. Piecing together the story of this little violin might just do the same for Stradivari… if only there were more pieces to work with!

In search of the ideal recording of Bach's St. Matthew Passion

Ever since performing the St. Matthew Passion in Berlin recently, I've become kind of obsessed with finding the perfect recording. Helmuth Rilling comes pretty close -- but Quasthoff (follow the link) to my ear sounds ein bisschen too self-confident in his expression of the text and the melody. "Mache dich mein Herze rein"? This should be sung with skill but also with humility, as my friend Simon Robinson did so beautifully in recent performances (Quastoff 0/Robinson 1). I just got John Eliot Gardiner's version which is damn near perfect only for someone with perfect pitch the half-step dip makes all my Affektenlehre verwirrt! If anyone has a favorite recording I wanna hear from you!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjoGspzkYw8

"You can hold the Strad but you can’t play it"

Today my Strad-hunting took me to the Musikinstrumentmuseum in Berlin which boasts a 1703 violin in its collection. They pulled it from the display for me so I could meet it in a private room. I had a shoulder rest and bow ready so imagine my disappointment when the official handed me a pair of white handschuhe (gloves) and told me it was not in playable condition. A quick examination even by my untrained eyes told me why: this was a battered instrument, a survivor of domestic abuse, copious knocks and bruises, and multiple repairs. Its right f-hole was askew and someone had wound an E-string adjustor into the grain so bad it had dented the wood and formed a black mark. My heart ached for this instrument: it was the Frankenstein of violins! I was curious about its provenance but it is shrouded in mystery. I don’t know where it went after leaving Stradivari’s workshop; all that is known is:

· It was brought to Germany from Russia in the 1950s or 60s by a Geigenbauer named Schlieps, according to a dealer called Rudolf Pliverics.

· It was authenticated in 1969 by Malcolm R. Sadler of Ealing-Strings in London

· According to a dendrochronologist at Hamburg University in 1993 it was definitely made of wood dating from no later than 1680.

· It was played by various members of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra.

· It was restored by Geigenbauerin Olga Adelmann, who was the first-ever female violin-maker, and trained during the Nazi era (oh my god, can you imagine?)

[Pictures to follow]

Strad-hunting (Part 3/3)

I forgot to post this until now. In the middle of March I learned that the 1732 “Red Diamond” Stradivari was being repaired at a New York City luthier’s and went on the hunt. I found the luthier, but the violin sadly was not available that day. The scent of the trail did however lead to a wonderful opportunity to play a Vuillaume that once belonged to Spivakov (super bright E string, of course, and blazingly brilliant in Tchaikovsky), a 1704 Stradivari (actually kind of disappointing—it had undergone multiple repairs), an Andrea Amati (nice! not sure what year) and—best of all—a seriously light bow made by François Nicolas Voirin (1833-1885). I think he was related to Vuillaume (cousins?); he revolutionized the Tourte model by making the stick thinner yet somehow stronger. I hadn’t realized until that day what an enormous difference it makes to play with such a light and beautiful bow: my right arm felt unworthy. The coveted Strad may have failed to materialize, but… well, as a wise man once said, you go looking for “this” and you find “that.”

[Pictured: the Vuillaume]

Kalliwoda Duets for Violin and Viola, Op. 208

The string duo repertory is not huge but there are some gems—among them Mozart’s Duos for Violin and Viola and Duos for Violin and Cello by Ravel and Kodaly. The challenge for the composer is to create a full sonority without sounding like a string quartet with members missing. Mozart’s Duos are at times brilliant, like the Sinfonia Concertante without the orchestra (Brahms didn’t write any duos, despite having written a Double Concerto for Violin and Cello).

The Duos by Jan Kalliwoda (1801-1866) are new to me. His solutions to the problem of how to write for the 2 instruments together struck me as ingenious, while stylistically he tips his hat at Schubert and Dvorak—unsurprisingly for a violinist born and trained in Prague. But his voice is entirely his own. Of the two, the second in G-Major is the more striking: from the opening Pastorale (a Romantic-Edenic throwback) and Allegro moderato in G-minor (might Mozart have sounded like this if he’d lived a few more years?) to the interplay of pizzicato, counterpoint, and occasional flashes of virtuosity in the last three movements, the possibilities of violin-and-viola texture are explored fully. He succeeds in his own individual way at making this combo sound complete. As a violinist, I’ve long felt musically “completed” when partnering with a pianist; who knew I could feel the same with a violist?