Cynthia Phelps with the Eastern Music Festival orchestra

 The Viola Concerto by Julia Adolphe (b. 1988) received its full orchestral performance in Dana Auditorium on the Guilford College campus in preparation for its New York City premiere. Second on the program came the premiere performance of Adolphe’s Viola Concerto as played by New York Philharmonic principal violist Cynthia Phelps. The Viola Concerto was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic, the League of American Orchestras, and violist Phelps – its intended soloist. Adolphe’s 20-minute long concerto is entitled Unearth, Release and is in three movements: “Captive Voices,” “Surface Tension,” and “Embracing Mist.” In the first movement, the viola is often juxtaposed with the full orchestra. Adolphe describes this as “asserting the soloist’s identity and musical voice” on the part of the composer, soloist, and solo instrument. The second movement is a scherzo-like extension of the competition between soloist and orchestra. In the final movement, the orchestra becomes “an embracing mist,” a thinned out texture “through which the viola moves.”

Adolphe gave Phelps a broad palette of both tone color and dynamic shading within the writing of this piece. The rich lower and middle registers of the viola had plenty of scope but the extremes of the instrument’s range were explored with some fine high harmonics. The composer has treated the orchestra brilliantly by only giving it its ff head while the viola rests. The textures were either thinned out or the dynamics were hushed and ethereal during Phelp’s solos. The opening movement was slow with the plaintive viola often surrounded by hushed strings or paired with individual players such as concertmaster Jeffrey Multer or a spare pp orchestral piano or punctuated by light percussion.

These imaginative pairings continued in the lively second movement, which linked the viola with various brass and woodwinds including a lovely duet with a bass clarinet played by Kelly Burke. Highlights of the last movement were Phelps’ gorgeous playing of some high harmonics as well as duets with a muted trumpet and, I believe, an English horn.

Adolphe’s Viola Concerto is a substantial contribution to the repertoire with interesting writing for the soloist and a model of how to orchestrate for string instruments that can be easily lost in a full orchestra. It should win advocates from violists, and I hope it gets recorded by Phelps as soloist.

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