Viola Concerto

The Concerto for Viola and Orchestra by Sofia Gubaidulina from 1996 begins sparsely, because - as the composer says - it was her idea ‘to create something multifaceted from a single tone. First one tone, which then runs in a small second.’ This slow, often fractured structure of the work creates a tremendous amount of tension. Many elegiac passages intermingle with motivic cells in the accompanying orchestra.
In 2015, Gubaidulina arranged the solo part for the viola concerto, which was written twenty years ago for the violist Yuri Bashmet. In this version, the fascinating violist Antoine Tamestit and the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie under Jonathan Nott have now recorded the concerto for the EMCD label together with Anton Bruckner's Symphony No. 9 in D minor. Gubaidulina's and Bruckner's sound worlds certainly have a lot in common. Jonathan Nott says: ‘Sofia Gubaidulina and Anton Bruckner have created their own worlds and are modern in the best sense of the word in their respective times. Their mastery in the development of large-scale compositional forms unites them just as much as a spiritually characterised conception of sound.’
For Gubaidulina, the sound spectrum, the dark timbre and the great variability of the viola have always been appealing. In her viola concerto, however, the composer has a special surprise in store: ‘The peculiarly mysterious and veiled nature of the viola timbre has always been enigmatic to me, but at the same time the object of my enthusiasm. It was precisely this characteristic of the viola that led me to include an additional element in the scoring of the work, which was suitable for creating a new sound dimension that was clearly different from the orchestral sound: a solo string quartet whose instruments are tuned a quarter tone lower.’