You did what to a 300-year-old viola?

A lot of our audience members are under the impression that the instruments we play are unaltered originals that have somehow survived the centuries. If only that were true!

Some years back Susan had the chance to purchase an old English viola (via our daughter’s English teacher, of all people). At the time Susan was teaching the girls how to play viola on a borrowed instrument – she didn’t own one. The paperwork was legit and the price reasonable, so after some consideration, Susan decided to buy the instrument. At the time Susan could barely read alto clef, but she adored that soulful viola sound. Fast forward a couple of decades and Susan is playing viola quite a bit.

At the Telluride Festival a couple of summers ago Susan showed the viola to Toby Appel, the virtuoso violist. He saw the potential of the instrument, but he told Susan that the neck was the widest he’d ever seen and that the length of the strings made the viola play bigger than it was. (Violas come in a lot of different sizes, but the standard measurement is the length of the body, not the neck.) And it had this very thick nut (the place where the strings meet the scroll) that appeared to be a clumsy attempt to rectify the string length. Toby suggested replacing the neck to make it far easier to play. (My guess is that strange nut was itself an early alteration to the original instrument.)

It took a while for Susan to come around to making the significant investment in replacing the neck, and she worried as she waited for the “new” instrument. Would her Thomas Smith sound the same, or would the process be as dangerous to the tone as giving a great singer a nose job?!

After a month with the rejuvenated Mr. Smith (who went to Salt Lake City and not Washington) Susan is thrilled to report that her viola plays more naturally and vividly than ever before. And she is thrilled to introduce the her “new” instrument in this set of Ives Collective concerts!

For our upcoming Ives Collective concert, Subject Matters, we have chosen three Preludes and Fugues composed or arranged from J.S. Bach by Mozart.

Why these three (out of the six published as K.404a)? All of the Preludes were actually composed by Mozart! The fugues are Mozart’s arrangements of fugues by Bach from the Well -Tempered Clavier. As you can see in the audio examples linked to below, Mozart changed the keys for all three works. As a violist himself Mozart understood that simply arranging the original three-voiced fugues in Bach’s keys would not result in the most resonant sound for the ensemble. His choices involve more open strings, making them far friendlier for players and their instruments.

Here are YouTube links to recordings of the original fugues by J.S. Bach which Mozart arranged for violin, viola and cello.

1) Fugue: Performance on piano with a graphic score (in Eb minor – D minor for the trio version):

2) Fugue: also a piano performance with score (In F# minor – G minor for the trio version):

3) Fugue: piano with score (in F# Major, not F as in the string trio):

How could I possibly forget P.D.Q. Bach’s (Peter Schickele’s) collaboration with the Oberlin Symphony when I was a student at the Oberlin Conservatory?

If my memory is correct, P.D.Q. swung down onto the Finney Chapel stage from the rafters, sliding quite a few feet on his stomach and coming to a halt a few feet from the back of the platform. What an entrance!! The concert included some P.D.Q. classics, but my most vivid memory is of his solo piano encore, “The High Karate Variations”. (High Karate was a pretty popular line of men’s fragrances at the time.) The first stand of cellos was just a few feet from the composer’s face and we wept with hysteria as he performed.

Later, I was introduced to the Schickele family through Andor Toth, the founder of the Stanford String Quartet who was friendly with Peter’s brother, David, an accomplished violist and documentary film maker. In fact, David invited us to join him in a memorial performance of the Schubert Cello Quintet to honor the passing of David and Peter’s father. At that time I had no idea that Peter Schickele was a serious composer.

What fun it has been to discover his more serious music through the charming and infectiously joyous Clarinet Quartet!
~ Stephen

Acclaim – Media Kit

What The Critics Are Saying

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“The musicians are a unified force that shows…brilliant playing.”
–San Francisco Classical Voice

“…a gut-wrenching performance, building toward that fierce, beyond-the-speed-limit, trillion-noted fourth movement; Mussumeli left the stage flopping her right hand in the air, as if to cool it off.
–San Jose Mercury News

“…it is apparent that the Ives Quartet is an undeniably talented group of musicians.”
–Buffalo News

“The Ives’s arresting sound was again on display: robust, rigorous and beautifully blended.”
–San Jose Mercury News

“Unveiling a warm, smooth approach laid over a taut but not rigid attitude toward rhythm.”
–Buffalo News

“performed with a super-refinement that kept breaking out into a visceral, almost rock ‘n’ roll intensity.”
–San Jose Mercury News

“The Ives Quartet more than lived up to their name, playing Ives’ own Second Quartet with all the required force and grit, not minding the dissonances and extreme difficulties, and embracing the quirkiness that,  a hundred years after its creation, still leaves listeners in awe.
–San Francisco Classical Voice

“…you certainly do not want to miss this fantastic group.”
–Trinity Tripod