San Francisco Classical Voice

The Hindemith would shock anyone who knew only his music from a few years later; it's blissfully rhapsodic in a way that suggests Strauss or maybe Debussy. (Though there are traces of the Hindemithian humor even here — I'm thinking of the fugato variation in the finale headed "Mit bizarrer Plumpheit," which means more or less what you'd think.) Bloch's Suite is rhapsodic, too, in the slightly "exotic" vein he often favored, and Clarke's Sonata tempers a similar idiom with a folksongish strain rather like Vaughan Williams.

Three major pillars of the viola repertoire, all written in the same year, look like a ready-made recital program. (Indeed, at least one player, the fine Israeli-born violist Yizhak Schotten, has already collected them on a CD titled — what else? — Viola 1919.) But put all three end to end and eventually it's just excessive. Too many juicy harmonies, too many poignantly modal melodies, too much flamboyant musical rhetoric. I mean, I don't care how much you like fudge brownies; you don't want to make a meal of them.

Mind you, should you have wanted an hour and a half's worth of rich chocolatey goodness on Friday evening, Old First Church was certainly the place to be. The viola is a notoriously awkward instrument, an acoustical compromise (too small for its range), temperamental, persnickety. But in Walther's hands you tend to forget all that. There are other violists that can make as powerful an impression in their way — in fact, there are a blessedly large number of them now — but not many that move around the instrument with her kind of ease.

Which is the uncanny genius of Walther: she makes playing the viola look natural. She plays with the exuberant, unconscious physicality of a natural athlete running. Her technique is efficient as hell — no half-inch of bow goes unused, for one thing — but "efficiency" suggests cool calculation, whereas Walther's playing is all innocent strength. She draws bow more or less the way she draws breath.

And that sound! If one were to design a program deliberately to show off the Walther sound — that unusual combination of solidity and resonance, that heady vibrato — this would be it. In particular, it gave her ample opportunity to play brilliantly high on the A string and sonorously low on the C string (the extremes of the violist's register and the sites of most violistic bravado), but also to shine on the inner strings, where her sound really is peculiarly powerful and beautiful. And she brought a splendid, elemental swagger to all three pieces. I don't think I've ever heard the Clarke played with such a perfect combination of force of utterance and beauty of voice. (Bogas had cautiously opted for a barely-open piano lid, but in the event he was able to play at full strength throughout without overbalancing Walther, and his graceful-yet-strong playing was a match for hers.)

All the same, I wish the program had afforded Walther (or rather, demanded of her) greater breadth. If only she had had to play genuinely quietly, or without vibrato, or (heaven forfend) unbeautifully! The announced program for this recital included a different Hindemith sonata, Op. 25/1, an unaccompanied piece that contains a famous, furious movement headed (among other things) "Tonschönheit ist Nebensache": "Beauty of tone is of lesser importance." I wish she'd played that; it would have been interesting.