Viola Concertos

Conspiratorial Voices

By Andrew Mellor

Where the violin soars above an orchestra, the viola cuts through the middle of it, cajoling it from within. Following his Dacapo recording, which explored the capacities of this ever-fascinating instrument in monologue – a programme including works by Karsten Fundal and Søren Nils Eichberg (Dacapo 8.226588) – here, violist Rafaell Altino joins his own orchestra for three bespoke concertos composed for him. The result is as much a snapshot of twenty-first century ‘orchestral’ Denmark as an audit of the varied musical and structural influences the concertante viola can exert.

Tuned a perfect fifth below the violin, the viola’s relationship with its orchestral colleagues is deliciously ambiguous. The instrument itself is imbued with a particular fertility and potential, a prospect that has attracted composers from Berlioz to Rebecca Clarke, from Britten to Brett Dean. Often we are told of the viola’s chocolatey warmth – its solemnity, mellowness, introspection and depth. We hear less about its ability to fire, provoke or hoodwink an orchestra, all made possible by the instrument’s bodily range and big-boned sound.

In the three concertos included here, the viola appears by turns a neo-Romantic hero, uninterested loner and shadowy foil. All three scores are united by Rafaell Altino’s essential role in their genesis and by his colossal technical armoury, colour palette and sense of character. We hear the Odense Symphony Orchestra’s own violist at home, with colleagues – singing and conspiring, battling and placating.

Karsten Fundal: Viola Concerto (2008)
Karsten Fundal’s body of work serves as a resonant example of how imposing stern restrictions on compositional methodology can free a composer up to be even more impulsive and expressive. For a time, Fundal’s music was associated with the systematic procedures of the so-called ‘Aarhus School’ and its patriarch Per Nørgård, at which point Fundal developed his own serial method known as the ‘Feedback System’.

That, though, was just the start. ‘When you know your constructions really well and let go of them, it is your very own music that comes out of it,’ Fundal has written. Inspired partly by the spirit of Morton Feldman and partly by his own creative imperative to take his listeners on some sort of journey (even if that journey remains undefined), Fundal let his formative sense of discipline lay the groundwork for greater creative freedom.

That freedom can manifest itself in Fundal’s reveling in the orchestral timbres and colours those systemic rules can’t reach. That has lent his orchestral works a particular virility and allowed him to explore impressionistic techniques such as the ‘clair-obscur’, in which light and shadows mingle across a blurred palette that can establish a useful counterpoint between foreground and background.

A good example comes right at the start of Fundal’s Viola Concerto, first performed by Rafaell Altino and the Odense Symphony Orchestra under Michael Schønwandt in 2008. The concerto opens with a clear-cut, almost romantic melody from the soloist set against an intriguingly smudged orchestral backdrop. It is not long before this lucid argument gets drawn into something altogether more demonic, deep and ambiguous.

This affords Fundal the opportunity to colouristically disembowel his orchestra, a process led by his nose for timbre. We hear glassy string harmonics, episodes in which texture and harmony are derived from one another, and passages in which music already heard reappears as if a shadow of itself. The soloist rediscovers ardent lyricism from time to time, sometimes playing in octaves to bolster its own diminutive cut-through.

The concerto’s title page bears the words ‘Lysende mørke / Mørknende lys’ (‘Lightened Darkness / Darkened Light’) and ‘Vigende genkald’ (‘Dwindling Recall’). The former elements are apparent in the work’s shadow games, the latter in the journey from lucid clarity – the soloist playing almost continuously, indulging in a series of clear patterns and sequences all of which induce a refracted or directly confrontational response from the orchestra – towards almost complete disintegration.

After the last of the soloist’s sequenced, arpeggiated patterns – this accompanied by two bassoons in relay – pitched sounds begin to dissolve and with them the soloist’s continuous melody. In the end, the viola can only tweet fragments of a tune over a fundamentally pitchless soundscape dominated by rainsticks. Recall has dwindled; darkness has come to light.

Christian Winther Christensen: Viola Concerto (2019)
Christian Winther Christensen’s music is recognisable in an instant. It lures its listeners into a charming and distinctive hinterland, one that drapes a blanket of quietness over a mass of precise detail. Focus and clarity reign supreme in the composer’s tilt-shift, model village landscapes where every gesture is weighed and refined. Behind all the scraping, twanging, flicking and clicking, Christensen uses melody and tonal harmony exquisitely and originally.

Like Fundal, Christensen studied in Aarhus where he became interested in the music of Lachenmann, Sciarrino and Ferneyhough. He was later a student at the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen under Bent Sørensen, Hans Abrahamsen and Niels Rosing-Schow, and at the Paris Conservatory where he studied with Henri Dutilleux. His works have been performed, broadcast and recorded throughout Europe.

In its extreme intimacy, Christensen’s Viola Concerto invites deep listening from its audience and reportedly did so at the premiere in Odense under conductor David Danzmayr in 2019. ‘I try to think of most people when I am composing; to take the audience and control it,’ Christensen said in 2020; ‘that means using some rhetorical devices. It’s fun when people get an idea where you’re going, and you then go somewhere else.’

In the concerto, as in many other scores by Christensen, beauty – whether melodic or harmonic – is found and lost like buried treasure. Poignancy and humour combine in writing that is harmonically, rhythmically and contrapuntally sophisticated, occupying its own frantic and fleeting world. The general air of windswept quietness is established with strings tapped with rods rather than bowed, instruments patted and scraped, and woodwinds blown without reeds. Rarely does anything sound fully or in the foreground.

The piece includes an element of the absurd, roping fleeting tonal harmonies and consistently forceful rhythmic patterns into its concerto form, often embedding the soloist sympathetically within the ensemble or having him carve away at repetitive arpeggios as if oblivious to the orchestra’s very existence. After a glancing, touchstone tonal harmony, the arpeggio figures that appear at the start of the first movement, accompanied by a mirroring ‘ghost viola’, return in the fifth movement before powering down, all out of will.

At various stages the concerto tries to find upward traction – in the brief take-offs of the third movement and the more determined ascents of the fourth. They come to fruition in the seventh and final movement as the soloist, suddenly and unusually in the foreground and playing with a standard bowed technique, loops rhythmically sequenced upward scales, drawing the ensemble along with it. Like a mechanical loom, the ensemble motors patiently and elegantly home towards an almost incidental final chord.

Søren Nils Eichberg: Charybdis (2016)
Much of Søren Nils Eichberg’s music is derived from a fierce dramatic impulse, deftly harboured and well organized. The composer has referred to this working method as ‘psychological form’, even if narrative is as clearly discernible as the music’s rigorous construction – the latter betraying a Haydn-like tendency to build with discipline and lucidity from small or cellular blocks.

Rafaell Altino took up and later recorded Eichberg’s solo viola work Recitare (originally for solo violin), written a year before the composer’s single-movement concertante work dedicated to Altino, Charybdis. The latter was first performed by Altino with his own Odense Symphony Orchestra in 2016 under Schønwandt.

The work is subtitled Wirbelraush – the German word approximating something like a ‘vortex rush.’ Charybdis itself is a maelstrom situated off the coast of southern Italy in the direction of Sicily; in Homer’s Odyssey, it was imagined as a sea monster so powerful that no ship could escape its spiraling vortex, even with the assistance of Poseidon.

The inevitability of this force of natural destruction appealed to Eichberg in all its ‘alarming fascination’. For the composer, it reflected our own human attraction ‘to the dangerous and the unknown – the forbidden and the wild’ and the sense of an artist’s ‘yearning for one’s own ruin.’ The composer had explored a similar impulse in his earlier concertino for piano and ensemble Hærværk (Dacapo 8.226556), named after the novel by Tom Kristensen that charts the decadent descent of a respected Copenhagen journalist into alcoholism.

What we hear in this continuously played concerto is akin to a battle of wills in which the solo instrument finds itself caught in the spiraling vortex of the orchestra, sometimes resisting with fortitude, sometimes surrendering deliriously to its force. As Eichberg notes: ‘Although you know that this will be your downfall, you cannot let go … But already it does not matter anymore, because you have long since been embraced by this thing that is bigger than yourself … you cannot escape, but you don’t even want to escape anymore.’

We can certainly understand the viola as being at the ‘vortex’ of the orchestra – right at its heart. Here, the solo instrument is adept at conjuring a sense of vertigo amid the maelstrom of vertiginous activity provided by the ensemble. Starting with the elemental conflict established by the smudged descending lines of the concerto’s opening, the stability of the material is gradually eroded.

An obvious point of rupture around halfway through the score leads to a calmer section in which destructive forces are not defeated, just rendered latent. After something of a plateau and another tussle, the soloist offers a small cadenza, searching the instrument’s range before settling on pugilistic repetitions of a single note and circular motif. It then surrenders altogether to the orchestra’s demonic abandon. There is no sense of the viola as a shrinking violet here, as it engages fully and physically in an argument with an entire orchestra.

© Andrew Mellor, 2026

Andrew Mellor is author of The Northern Silence – Journeys in Nordic Music and Culture (Yale University Press)