It’s late autumn — viola time.
The viola should perhaps be the instrument of summer. Its tone suggests sumptuous ripeness from the top of its range to bottom. But falling between the violin’s soaring brilliance and the cello’s corporeality, the viola also signifies transition. Toru Takemitsu called his tender, mistily opaque viola concerto “Ring Around Autumn.” By recognizing the solo instrument as a conveyor of stock-taking, it colors darkly, evoking changing leaves and sunset.
Last week, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Colburn School and MOCA independently hopped on the fall-harvesting viola bandwagon. On top of that, one of the season’s most alluring new recordings is of Morton Feldman’s “The Viola in My Life,” by one of today’s leading violists, Antoine Tamestit.
The real surprise of the week was that, in their chamber music series, the L.A. Phil, LACO and Colburn all programmed one or more of Brahms’ seldom-heard string quintets and/or string sextets. Brahms wasn’t the first to juice up the string quartet with a second violin. Mozart’s late string quintets (sometimes called viola quintets) demonstrated the heavenly richness that an extra viola brings to the string quartet. But Brahms took the next step in his quintets (with doubled violas) and sextets (also double cellos) adding his rhapsodically “Brahmsian” plush, soul-warming thickened textures.
The L.A. Phil began viola week with a Tuesday evening program, “Brahms Strings,” as part of the orchestra’s chamber music series at Walt Disney Concert Hall that included the blazing early First Sextet and late, luminously serene Second Quintet. As part of its chamber music series across the street in the Colburn School’s Zipper Hall, Saturday, LACO coincidentally held “A Brahmsian Affair,” in this case featuring both the sextets. Adding to the coincidence, the Colburn School had programmed Sunday in its smaller Thayer Hall, Brahms’ First String Quintet as part of one of its chamber music programs.
It didn’t quite turn out that Brahmsians would have the rare chance of a full survey of the quintets and sextets downtown over six days. Colburn wound up substituting Brahms Piano Trio No. 2 — no violas. But the school made up for it Saturday during a day-long MOCA seminar relating South Korean artist Haegue Yang’s 2024 installation work, “Star-Crossed Rendezvous after Yun,” which will be on view in March, to the music of Isang Yun. The seminar included a performance of the Korean composer’s 1988 “Contemplation,” for two violas, played with gripping meditative intensity by recent Colburn graduate, Lan Cao, and current conservatory student, Ran Tae.
What goes with Brahms is always a good question, and both the L.A. Phil and LACO set the stage with something modern. At Disney, that was Jessie Montgomery’s folk-style short 2008 string quartet, “Strum,” demonstrating the extraordinary vibrancy of a plucked viola string. A violin pizzicato is sharp, cutting. A cello’s has the aura of a bass drum. The viola sounds like a heartbeat heard through a stethoscope. When the autumnal Second Quintet began, the two eloquent Philharmonic violas were ready to stealthily underscore a work of profound lyric restraint. In the second half, an early 20th century oddball fantasia for four violas by British composer/violist York Bowen was preceded a gripping performance of the First Sextet.
Members of Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra perform Brahms’ String Sextet No. 1 at Colburn School Zipper Hall on Nov. 22.
(Elizabeth Asher Photography / Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra)
LACO’s sextet program also went in reverse order, the second sextet heard before the first. Brahms was 27 and 32 when he wrote them. The first captivates via a young man’s earnest effusiveness; the second’s effusiveness, tainted by lovelorn glum, deepens.
LACO also commissioned a young L.A. composer, Julia Moss, to write her own string sextet in tribute to pianist and composer Sarah Gibson, whose tragic death at 38 from cancer last year devastated the L.A. new music community. Moss (who is a year younger than the Brahms of the First Sextet) prepared 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, in their middle-way range and manner, kept the balance.
LACO boasts but two violas in its ensemble, and they mattered. This time against the big moments of melody that Brahms assigns violin and cello, LACO’s principal violist, Yura Lee, dramatically revealed how bits of Brahms’ messy soul also found its voice in the viola.
In fact, this may be one reason why Brahms’ only solo music for viola was an alternate version he made of his two clarinet sonatas composed near the end of his life. In 1986, the L.A. Phil commissioned Luciano Berio to write a concerto for its noted principal clarinetist Michele Zukovsky, and Berio responded by orchestrating the piano part of Brahms’ Clarinet Sonata No. 1, turning it into a fascinating clarinet concerto.
Following in Brahms’ footsteps, Berio also made a version for viola and orchestra. The clarinet concerto, which he titled “Op. 120, No. 1” (the opus number of Brahms’ sonata), is widely played and has been recorded several times. The viola version is stunningly beautiful yet never recorded and remains practically unknown. Berio, who was arguably the greatest 20th century Italian composer after Puccini, had a special feel for the viola as a solo instrument. The 100th anniversary of Berio’s birth was in October. What are violists and orchestras (the L.A., in particular, with this feather in its cap) waiting for? Both versions on the same program would be even better than one.
On our shores, one of America’s most important composers, Morton Feldman, happened to be born less than three months after Berio and he was a viola guy too. A viola haunts his best-known work, “Rothko Chapel,” which like “The Viola in My Life” is from the early 1970s, the latter telling the story of Feldman’s infatuation with the instrument (and a violist) in four movements of ethereal subtlety.
“I didn’t choose the viola for its repertory,” Tamestit writes in the notes to the recording, “I chose it for its sound.”
He’s not the only one, and you don’t have to be a violist. Nor does viola-love ultimately know a season.
