If you’ve attended a music school, or even a music camp, you’ve heard a lot of viola jokes (not to worry, there are jokes about most other instru­ments as well). I’ve been mildly amused by a few, but I never felt the incli­na­tion to pick on the viola – like Mozart, I’m par­tic­u­larly fond of the instru­ment. I love the range along which it lies, the bari­tone lows to the feath­ery highs, and espe­cially the woody, throaty tim­bre which to my ears is clos­est to reach­ing the spe­cial vocal­ized qual­ity that makes the gamba so lovely. Now we are for­tu­nate to have a new record­ing that renews the case for the instru­ment, “first things first” from Nadia Sirota on the con­tin­u­ously impres­sive New Ams­ter­dam label.

This is a recital album, a series of new works that place the viola at the cen­ter, and although it’s not flaw­less, the whole is in this case greater than the sum of its parts. Sirota’s play­ing has a great deal to do with this suc­cess; her sound is full-bodied, her into­na­tion is excel­lent and she plays every­thing with con­vic­tion and musi­cal­ity. The other impor­tant ele­ment is that the record­ing is extremely well assem­bled. It is a real album, with the pieces placed in such a way that the weak­nesses are less­ened and the strengths rein­forced, and I would credit both Sirota and co-producer Judd Green­stein with this.

Green­stein is also the com­poser of the most suc­cess­ful works on the album, the solo piece ‘Escape’ and the con­clud­ing work for viola accom­pa­nied by the Chiara String Quar­tet, ‘The Night Gath­er­ers.’ The lat­ter piece, which brings the album to a rich and sat­is­fy­ing con­clu­sion, is a lyric and roman­tic minor key bal­lade full of beau­ti­ful, lush sounds, exquis­itely crafted and per­formed. ‘Escape’ is the lit­eral and aes­thetic cen­ter­piece of the album and demon­strates the craft of com­po­si­tion at its best. Green­stein starts with min­i­mal melodic, har­monic and rhyth­mic mate­r­ial; a repeated, accented descend­ing minor third, then he com­poses. He moves the inter­val around, pairs it, adds a tran­si­tional note and rhythm, expands it, takes it apart, devel­ops a range of dynam­ics and tex­tures. He turns a frag­ment into an involved, and involv­ing, solo work, full of emo­tional and intel­lec­tual inten­sity. The con­nec­tion between where the music began and where it is and is going is always in our ears. It’s a tour-de-force work and a tour-de-force per­for­mance by Sirota.

Two other com­posers are fea­tured on the album, Nico Muhly and Mar­cos Bal­ter. Muhly’s three pieces, ‘Duet No. 1, Chorale Point­ing Down,’ and etudes ‘1’ and ‘1A’ rep­re­sent the spec­trum of strength and weak­ness within. The first piece, the album opener adds Clarice Jensen on cello and is brac­ing and fas­ci­nat­ing. It opens with a dra­matic ges­ture, force­ful, minor key and dis­so­nant inter­vals, and then pro­ceeds to take that mate­r­ial apart and build new music from it, music dif­fer­ent in style and emo­tional tone. The turns and trans­for­ma­tions are nat­ural and inter­est­ing – this is another fine, sat­is­fy­ing work. The etudes are the oppo­site, stud­ies in rhythm that try and make too much out of weak mate­r­ial. The prob­lem is the rhythm itself, a sharply dot­ted fig­ure that has some over­dubbed accom­pa­ni­ment but which never changes (is never actu­ally stud­ied), and is itself is awk­ward and slightly irri­tat­ing, sound­ing too much like and attempt to notate swing. Com­pared with ‘Escape,’ these are just at the level of quasi-improvisatory sketches, not fin­ished pieces.

Balter’s ‘Ut’ and ‘Live Water’ are stud­ies as well, but a suc­cess­ful ones. A piece that is truly an etude should present some­thing to be explored and offer some pos­si­bil­i­ties. These are basi­cally sim­ple but son­i­cally evoca­tive works about the pos­si­ble qual­i­ties of sound that the instru­ment can cre­ate, and sound envi­ron­ments in which to place the viola. They are full of tim­bres; glassy, rich, ghostly, plucked and sawed strings and enhanced with some sig­nal pro­cess­ing and, on ‘Live Water,’ a whis­pered voice. They are med­i­ta­tive dream­scapes and seri­ous explo­rations of the instru­ment and work as mate­r­ial that brings together the strands of explo­ration and med­i­ta­tion that are the final, last­ing sen­sa­tions of this fine album.

As a post­script, in my library I now have a decent sam­pling of New Ams­ter­dam releases, some I’ve already writ­ten about and oth­ers that I’ve had just for myself. The music that I’ve heard cov­ers a range from sophis­ti­cated and exper­i­men­tal pop to con­tem­po­rary cham­ber music and jazz big band and all of it is clearly selected and pre­pared with a catholic atti­tude and excel­lent taste for what makes each an excel­lent rep­re­sen­ta­tive of its style and think­ing. This is an impres­sive and excit­ing begin­ning, and my admi­ra­tion goes out to all who work at the label.