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Christ Church Cathedral
July 22, 2006
The viola, it must be admitted, has received a mixed press over the years, from Wagner's claim that it is commonly played by "infirm violinists, or by decrepit players of wind instruments who happen to have been acquainted with a string instrument once upon a time" to Sir John Barbirolli's "if you'd heard the violas when I was young, you'd take a bismuth tablet."
Perhaps the most baffling, though, is Sir Thomas Beecham's description of the viola as "that instrument of mixed sex...this hermaphrodite of the orchestra." I'm still not entirely sure what he meant.
And yet not everybody feels or has felt this way and we know for a fact that Mozart was a keen viola player: the Irish singer Michael Kelly, in his Reminiscences, recalls hearing a quartet consisting of violinists Dittersdorf and Haydn, violist Mozart and cellist Vanhal.
The Sinfonia Concertante was a popular form in in the 1770s in Paris and Mannheim, both of which had virtuosic orchestras; and Mozart - in addition to the the attributed work for winds - began composing similar works for violin and piano, and for string trio. Both were abandoned after little more than 100 bars.
The Sinfonia Concertante for Violin and Viola, K.364/K.320d, however, was completed and is a major work, "comparable in significance", says The New Grove, to the piano concerto K.271, which, in addition to being in the same key, of E flat, is considered by many to be Mozart's first masterpiece.
It was fitting that the series of concerts dedicated to Mozart's concertante works for strings should have closed with a delightful performance of the Sinfonia Concertante.
Personally, I am a big fan of the viola; part of the reason may be that this town seems to have an unusual number of unusually fine players of the instrument, Kenji Fusé being prominent among their number. He and violinist Pablo Diemecke made an excellent duo and their differences in playing style - Diemecke arguably more exuberantly extravert, Fusé more intimately introvert - to some extent simply reflected the differing natures of their instruments.
In a performance which combined elegance, energy and eloquence my only problem was that the relatively backward nature of the viola meant that Fusé was sometimes buried under the sound. I am reluctant to point the finger at the composer - whose orchestration is always tailored to the instrument it is accompanying - or Norman Nelson the conductor, or Fusé himself; on this occasion the acoustic (which also swallowed Fusé's explanation that, unusually, he'd be playing his viola in a different tuning) must take the blame.
However, I'm sure I'm not the only audience member who was prepared to forgive almost anything in exchange for the delicious coolness of the air inside the cathedral.
Before the interval, Diemecke completed his cycle of the violin concertos with the Concerto No.3. This was another charming performance from the opening tutti, nicely contoured by Nelson, to its decidedly undramatic close. Balances were excellent - except that the orchestral violas had the same problem as the solo viola was to have in the final work - and there was some exquisite wind playing at the opening of the slow movement.
I wasn't quite sure about the cadenzas Diemecke played, superbly though he did so; they seemed uncomfortably late 19th century and not really in keeping with the rest of the performance. A minor gripe.
The evening opened with the Divertimento, K.138, whose first movement sounded somewhat like an early study for the same movement of the much later Serenade, K.525 - that's Eine kleine Nachtmusik to the rest of us. Norman Nelson summoned forth a rich full sound from the orchestra, with a marvellously firm bottom end.
A perfect concert for a summer's evening.
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