Schnittke: Viola Concerto

Rising star of the viola, the exciting French player Antoine Tamestit, makes his second disc for Ambroisie/Naïve, with a pairing of two of the most significant works written for the instrument during the second half of the 20th century, Schnittke’s Viola Concerto and Shostakovich’s Viola Sonata. It’s the second of three recordings Tamestit is making, with support from the Borletti Buitoni Trust, in which he aims to explore a wide range of work written and arranged for solo viola. His first recording last year coupled Bach and Ligeti (Chaconne - AM111) and attracted high praise.

Alfred Schnittke wrote his Viola Concerto in 1985, the year that Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet Union, ended the Cold War and allowed Russians once again to enjoy the excitement of travel. The work was commissioned by the Russian violist Yuri Bashmet who gave the first performance a year later at the Royal Concertgebouw, Amsterdam. Ten years earlier in 1975 Dmitri Shostakovich knew he was dying when he wrote the Viola Sonata Op147 and that it would be his last work. Sadly Shostakovich did not live to hear his swansong in concert, but the dedicatee Fyodor Druzhinin performed it informally at Shostakovich’s house on what would have been the composer’s 69th birthday, 26 September.

Antoine Tamestit himself became enamoured of the rich, low tone of the viola as a ten-year-old. He found that the open C string, the same C with which both Schnittke’s Concerto and Shostakovich’s Sonata end, resonated warmly through his entire body and that with the end-button resting against his throat, he could feel the vibrations of the instrument as an extra voice.

Born in Paris to a schoolteacher mother and a composer father, Antoine Tamestit studied the viola with Jean Sulem at the Paris Conservatoire, in the United States with Jesse Levine and the Tokyo Quartet, and in Germany with the great Tabea Zimmermann. First prizes in the major viola competitions in Paris, New York and Munich (where he astounded the judges by playing the Schnittke Concerto from memory) demonstrated his brilliance, since when he’s been a soloist with many leading orchestras, among them the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, the BBC Philharmonic, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, and Orchestre de la Suisse Romande. He won the 2008 Credit Suisse award which brought him a Lucerne Festival concert with the Vienna Philharmonic and Riccardo Muti. Passionate about chamber music, he performs regularly with artists like Gidon Kremer, Emmanuel Pahud, Mischa Maisky and in trio with Frank Peter Zimmermann and Christian Poltéra. He is well-known in Britain from his period (2004-05) as a BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist, and he appears at the Wigmore Hall this autumn in two concerts (26 & 27 October) with Nicholas Angelich, Renaud and Gautier Capuçon.