Quincy Porter, an American composer who died in 1966, probably is better known as an educator. He was also a violist, and if you are viola conspiracy theorist, you might suspect that the instrument was the reason for his being overlooked. Maybe it was. Much terrific American viola music, including Morton Feldman's "The Viola in My Life" and John Harbison's Viola Concerto, doesn't get the attention it deserves. But the viola revival and a splendid new generation of American violists are about to change all that.
So all hail to Eliesha Nelson, a young African American violist from North Pole, Alaska (really), who has taken a fancy to Porter and recorded his complete works for viola on Dorian. She is a marvelous player, and Porter's is marvelous music.
Porter's Viola Concerto, written in 1948, seems to flow and flow. Its four movements are slow, fast, slow, fast, but the piece inhabits a middle path, where slow feels ever moving and fast feels like there is always time to stop and smell the roses. "Rivers, Rivers" could be a Quincy Porter title as well, except he stayed away from poetic titles. "Blues Lontains" for viola and piano was about as fancy as he got.
Nelson is a ravishing violist, and she is joined on the disc by an impressively multitalented John McLaughlin Williams, who conducts Northwest Sinfonia in the concerto, and he accompanies Nelson on viola duos for piano, harpsichord and violin. This disc is a real find.
The Irish violist Garth Knox, formerly a member of the adventurous Arditti Quartet, is now an adventurous soloist and composer in his own right. Although he has long been associated with hard-core European Modernism, he has branched out into early music playing the Baroque viola d'amore, which has sympathetic vibrating strings, as well as more folk-based new music. He put out a stunning solo CD last year that was all over the map. He has followed that with a new one, "Viola Spaces," on Mode that is also all over the map even though this time he composed all the music.
In a series of eight etudes, he explores ways of producing sound on the viola, using up to four different instruments. He then follows that up with a series of variations on the music of Marin Marais, a Baroque French composer. In addition he offers an entertaining viola and tuba duet and a lovely fantasy for viola d'amore and five violas based on Johannes Ockegham's 15th century music.
The hipster in the bunch is Nadia Serota, who plays solo viola music by fashionable young New York composers on "First Things First." The disc is on New Amsterdam Records. At least I think they are fashionable young New Yorkers. There are no program notes, which are considered passe in downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn new music clubs these days. The drink menu is thought the place for description and intellectual rigor.
Nico Muhly is the featured composer on Serota's program, and there are additional works by Judd Greenstein and Marcos Balter. All the music is facile, the products of composers in love with a few good ideas worked into the ground. But there is a good time to be had, what with these cocksure composers and Serota, who is an engagingly bouncy violist, obviously in no mood to let a little lamentation wreck their party.
The viola, they're no doubt saying, is the future.
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mark.swed@latimes.com
