The viola, as with the cello, suffers from problems of projection against an orchestral ensemble and so has not enjoyed wide popularity as a solo instrument. According to some musicologists, including Alfred Einstein, the essence of the concerto is not the display of virtuosity, but in conflict and resolution, and the viola is less suited than the piano, or even the violin, to balance itself against any orchestra that is not deliberately underused by the composer. Viola players were often originally violinists and so until recently there were few viola soloists. William Walton, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Paul Hindemith were among the first composers to write solo viola works for new, more capable players. These players in turn arranged works originally composed for other instruments, an example being Lionel Tertis's arrangement of Edward Elgar's cello concerto.
The Viola Concerto, Sz. 120, BB 128 (also known as Concerto for Viola and Orchestra) was one of the last pieces written by Béla Bartók. He began composing the work while living in Saranac Lake, New York, in July 1945. The piece was commissioned by William Primrose, a respected violist who knew that Bartók could provide a challenging piece for him to perform. He said that Bartók should not "feel in any way proscribed by the apparent technical limitations of the instrument"; Bartók, though, was suffering from the terminal stages of leukemia when he began writing the viola concerto and left only sketches at the time of his death.
History
Primrose asked Bartók to write the concerto in the winter of 1944. There are several letters between them regarding the piece. In one, from September 8, 1945, Bartók claims that he is nearly done with it and only has the orchestration to complete. The sketches however show that this was not truly the case. When Bartók died, the piece was finished by his close friend Tibor Serly in 1949. A first revision was made by Bartók’s son Peter and Paul Neubauer in 1995, and it was revised once more by Csaba Erdélyi. The concerto was premiered on December 2, 1949, by the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra with Antal Doráti conducting and Primrose as violist.
The Viola Concerto by William Walton was written in 1929 for the violist Lionel Tertis at the suggestion of Sir Thomas Beecham. The concerto carries the dedication "To Christabel" (Christabel McLaren, Lady Aberconway). When Tertis rejected the manuscript, composer and violist Paul Hindemith gave the first performance. The work was greeted with enthusiasm. It brought Walton to the forefront of British classical music. In The Manchester Guardian, Eric Blom wrote, "This young composer is a born genius" and said that it was tempting to call the concerto the best thing in recent music of any nationality. Tertis soon changed his mind and took the work up.
Walton and Hindemith's collaboration on the concerto engendered a close friendship that lasted until the latter's death in 1963. A performance by Tertis at a Three Choirs Festival concert in Worcester in 1932 was the only occasion on which Walton met Elgar, whom he greatly admired. Elgar, however, did not share the general enthusiasm for Walton's concerto.
The centrepiece of this all-Finnish concert, after the short, jubilant Flounce by Lotta Wennäkoski (b.1970), first heard at the Proms in 2017, was the UK premiere of Magnus Lindberg’s ViolaConcerto.
But before we reached that, we were faced with a new concerto by Magnus Lindberg, the inventive composer of eight previous concertos for this and that, but never one for the instrument sometimes regarded as the string section’s shyest member.
Mutual sympathy and acute listening among the OAE string players characterised both the concertos No 3 in G and No 6 in B flat, with the matching mellow tone of the two violas in the latter tellingly colouring the sound.
Bartok died on September 26, 1945, with the score of his ViolaConcerto unfinished, but he left behind an unparalleled canon of music that is deeply expressive and vital to our musical understanding today.
MacMillan’s Concerto is subtitled Ghosts, “as the music seems to be haunted by other, earlier musical spirits and memories”, as MacMillan puts it, the overt references being to Beethoven’s D Major...
San Diego Union-Tribune
25 Aug 2024
San Diego Union-Tribune
25 Aug 2024