Yuri Bashmet - Brahms, Shostakovich: Works arranged for Viola and Strings (1998)

Violists constantly complain about the scarcity of romantic works for their instrument. Yuri Bashmet added two by transforming Brahms's Clarinet Quintet and Shostakovich's 13th String Quartet into vehicles for solo viola and chamber orchestra. His justification is that Brahms did indeed suggest that a viola could replace the clarinet, and that Shostakovich's quartet features the viola and is dedicated to a violist. The Brahms transcription (Bashmet's own) is not successful: the texture is muddy; the work's intimacy, atmosphere, and character are lost. Moreover, the balance is poor and the playing shows little respect for Brahms's austere, mature, mellow style. The Shostakovich, in Tchaikovsky's arrangement, is much better. This music is in Bashmet's blood; taking over the solo passages not only of the viola part, but of all the others, he gives the death-haunted bleakness and wild agony of the piece an aching, numbing, emotional immediacy. The ending--a surging, high-pitched unison tone that abruptly breaks off at its peak--has been described as "a blinding white light and then--nothing," but the effect is undercut by the arrangement, which adds a low note at the last moment. --Edith Eisler