JAVS Summer 1998

73

The fall and winter of 1997-98, in Southern California were barren times for performances featuring the viola. Then, around the vernal equinox, like bears or per haps sloths coming awake from hibernation, violists began rousing into a flurry of activity. The first event after our long winter's nap probably represented the stretching and waking-up phase of the spring. On Saturday evening, 21 March, the soloist was Robert Becker, principal violist of the Pacific Sym phony, with John Alexander conducting forty-seven voices from the Pacific Chorale and a small orchestra. The work was Flos Campi by Ralph Vaughan Williams. The venue was three-thousand-seat Segerstrom Hall in the Orange County Performing Arts Center. All of us who know and love Flos Campi realize there are built-in problems with balance, and in a huge, unflattering hall, they get serious. In this performance, the violist was a fine visual presence, and with the last two movements' soporific tempo there was a decided inclination to return to torpor. The next and much happier event was Sunday afternoon, 22 March, at St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church in Newport Beach. The Australian violist Simon Oswell, who now makes his home in Pacific Palisades, performed with Ami Porat and the Mozart Camerata. St. Andrew's is acoustically friendly and a rea sonable size. Porat is a string-player as well as conductor. Oswell has a beautiful, unforced and large viola sound, which could be enjoyed easily. There were two viola pieces: Yiskor (In Memoriam), by the twentieth-century Israeli composer Oedoen Partos, which is scored for solo viola and strings. Written right after WWII, it is in memory ofvictims of the Holo caust. Mildly dissonant, it wanders rhythmi cally and melodically and was mildly received. It has a cadenza of mostly double-stops, which the soloist handily dispatched. This is yet another work in the viola repertory which is funereal in tone.

The Camerata program listed Concerto for Viola by J. C. Bach as the next viola offering. Program notes, however, made clear that this work is doubtless by Henri Casadesus, who founded the Societe des Instruments Anciens in Paris and who also played and published music for the viola d' amore. He had two brothers who wrote music and attributed it to composers of past ages. 1 Nevertheless, this C-minor concerto is a splendid work, almost in the classic style; but with a thematic echo of the first movement in the last, and other interior evidence, this is not a product of the eighteenth century. The entirely successful or chestral accompaniment is by brother Francis Casadesus. The Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra often performs programs in pairs in different venues. On 28 March they repeated the pro gram of the 27th, performed at Veterans Wadsworth Theatre in Westwood, in Glen dale's Alex Theatre, a refurbished art nouveau movie palace, which makes a wonderful con cert hall. The new music director of L.A. Chamber Orchestra is Jeffrey Kahane, a pianist, mostly, but a refreshing program builder. To introduce Lachrymae, for Viola and Strings, Opus 48a, by Benjamin Britten, he had the lute songs on which Lachrymae is based performed by soprano Virginia Sublett and lutenist John Schneiderman: "Flow my teares," and "If my complaints could passion move," both by John Dowland. Lachrymae is a much more successful work in the string orchestra version than in the piano version, which is the one usually heard. This performance used four violas on the conductor's left, four violins and four celli in the middle, two basses stage-left and rather back, with the soloist, Roland Kato (regular principal violist of the Chamber Or chestra) in a normal soloist's position. His playing was artistic, effortless, restrained, interesting, with no projection problem at all. There were texture changes, harmonics,