March 13, 2009: The voice of the viola

Magic happened last night at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, but only a handful of people got to appreciate it.  The occasion was a Viola Master Class conducted by Julliard faculty member and co-founder of the Brentano String Quartet, Misha Amory.  This is the second Viola Master Class I have attended this season (the first having been given last October by Kim Kashkashian);  and these two events have helped me to develop a deep appreciation for how the twentieth century was the time when, as the poet/author of the Song of Solomon (Revised Standard Version) would have put it, the voice of the viola came to be "heard in our land."  In Kashkashian's class we heard this voice in the music of Paul Hindemith and George Rochberg (my first exposure to the latter's music, to my great embarrassment).  The students who prepared for Amory brought concerto movements by (in the order of the program) Béla Bartók, Alfred Schnittke, and William Walton.

All three of these presentations were technically demanding.  However, because they were all executed skillfully, Amory could focus on more subtle aspects of execution, some of which involved the nature of the sound itself (which, as I recently observed, could be as critical to appreciating Johann Sebastian Bach as any more recent composer), while others fell into the vaguer nature of what I have called the "rhetoric" of performance.  It was in Amory's ability to communicate about such subtleties in ways that we in the audience, along with the students, could comprehend that the magic of the evening revealed itself.

Needless to say, Bartók, Schnittke, and Walton are radically different composers, united by little more than Robert Mann's precept that a composer is best understood in terms of the music to which he has been exposed;  so Amory had to draw upon different communicative strategies for each student.  Much of his approach to Bartók involved setting a historical context, suggesting that the extended solo passage that begins the concerto (which was actually completed by Tibor Serly after Bartók's death in 1945) was informed by the solo viola line at the opening of the sixth string quartet from 1941.  Amory could thus work with the student on getting just the right expressiveness of sound through what amounted to analogous (or, perhaps, "model-based") reasoning.

The context for Walton was a more general one, having to do with the generally pastoral invocations of the English countryside, so familiar to Walton through contemporaries such as Ralph Vaughan Williams.  (Walton's viola concerto was completed in 1929;  we can probably assume that he was familiar with the "Pastoral Symphony" that Vaughan Williams had completed in 1921.)  At the same time Amory chose to focus on the underlying wit of the final movement of Walton's concerto (which is what the student chose to prepare), invoking images of not only the landscape but also the bumpkins one might encounter on a walking tour of that landscape.  These images helped to "loosen up" what was probably an overly disciplined performance by a student who had probably been too buried in the notes of the music to appreciate this context.

Most awesome, however, was the student performance of the first two movements of the Schnittke concerto.  About a year ago I wrote a blog post about Schnittke entitled "Awakening from the Nightmare of History," in which I tried to examine his music through the lens of his struggle with the "Soviet approved" authority of music history.  That post attracted a comment referring to his "German/Russian dichotomy."  There is definitely a sense of German influence on a Soviet-educated composer in the viola concerto;  but one of the points I tried to make in my post was that Schnittke drew upon ridicule as his primary weapon against "the historical burdens of both the Soviet system and the Western obsession with Schoenberg's legacy."  In his first violin sonata, composed in 1963, this surfaced in a twelve-tone take on "La Cucaracha."  By the time of the viola concerto in 1985, he was less concerned with serialism and directed his acerbic wit to an out-of-context cadence in Ludwig van Beethoven's violin concerto.  (Schnittke had composed what may best be described as "kick-ass" cadenzas for the Beethoven concerto, which Gidon Kremer recorded in 1980;  so we know his preoccupation with Beethoven preceded his work on the viola concerto.)

Amory did not try to hide his comparative unfamiliarity with this composition.  Instead, he could turn his attention to the extent to which Schnittke's "attitude" could impose almost unrealistic challenges on the soloist.  Some of those challenges, particularly the conflict between the soloist and a "roaring" orchestra, could not be addressed because the violist had only a piano accompaniment.  However, Amory dealt with other problems, such as getting the most penetrating sound out of the highest-register passages, most effectively.  He also asked the student the most important question, "Do you really like this piece?"  The student's affirmative answer was entirely convincing.  Amory knew it before the student even answered, and the rest of us recognized it.  I, for one, hope that this student will have the opportunity to perform this work with full orchestra in a setting that I shall be able to attend.  It is now about ten years since Schnittke died, and this particular work definitely needs more exposure.  For that matter the entire Master Class was a reminder (even if not always a gentle one) that all viola compositions need more exposure!