Abierto a violistas y violinistas de nivel intermedio y avanzado, el Taller constará de 9 horas que cubrirán aspectos de técnica, musicalidad y presencia escénica. La actividad se celebrará en las facilidades del Conservatorio de Música de Puerto Rico en Miramar, del jueves 13 al sábado 15 de enero. El horario de las clases será de 9:30 am a 12:30 pm. Habrá un concierto especial el sábado 15, a las 3:00 pm en la Sala Sanromá, con la participación de los profesores.

La matrícula es libre de costo para estudiantes de la Escuela Libre de Música Ernesto Ramos Antonini. Los demás pagarán una cuota módica. El cupo es limitado por lo que recomendamos reservar su espacio con prontitud.

Karen Tuttle, una de las más renombradas pedagogas de la viola en los Estados Unidos, murió el pasado 16 de diciembre en Philadelphia. El New York Times publica lo siguiente:

By Margalit Fox:
Publicado el 24 de diciembre de 2010

Karen Tuttle, a violist and teacher whose singular approach to her instrument — which entailed the expression of deep feeling, the attainment of great physical comfort and occasionally the literal rending of garments — drew disciples from around the world, died on Dec. 16 at her home in Philadelphia. She was 90. The cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease, her daughter, Robin Herskowitz Heald, said.
For decades a ubiquitous soloist and chamber musician, Ms. Tuttle was praised by critics for her incisive musicianship and large, luminous sound. She was variously a member of the Schneider, Galimir and Gotham Quartets. She recorded widely and taught at the Juilliard School, the Curtis Institute of Music, the Peabody Institute and elsewhere.
Ms. Tuttle’s students have included some of the best-known violists in the world, among them Kim Kashkashian, Jeffrey Irvine and Carol Rodland. She collaborated with the violinists Yehudi Menuhin and Isaac Stern, the pianist Rudolf Serkin and the cellist Pablo Casals, among other eminent musicians.
The viola is the Delilah of the musical world. With its smoky alto voice, it is a seductive mistress, yet few instruments are better equipped to cause harm. Larger and heavier than a violin, the viola forces players to extend the left arm fully to support the instrument while simultaneously twisting it to get at the strings. Over time, the combination can wreak havoc on wrist, elbow and shoulder.
Ms. Tuttle’s approach, which came to be known as the Karen Tuttle Coordination Technique, emphasized the release of tension, both physical and mental, while playing. The technique not only helped keep the violist injury-free but also concentrated the body in such a way as to give a richer sound.
So ardent was Ms. Tuttle about sound production that for a time she had students remove the chin rests from their violas and cut holes in the left shoulders of their shirts. This let them experience the vibrations of the instrument — which is ultimately a box of air, set in motion — directly against the skin.
The free-spirited unorthodoxy that appeared to define Ms. Tuttle’s life was in place early on. She was born Katherine Ann Tuttle in Lewiston, Idaho, on March 28, 1920. She deplored the name Katherine and changed her name to Karen as a young woman.
An accomplished violinist as a child, the young Ms. Tuttle chafed in the classroom. In seventh grade she made a deal with her mother: if she were home-schooled, she would practice the violin four hours a day.
The mother agreed, and the daughter kept her word. At 14 she began performing professionally, though she lost her first job — playing in a funeral parlor — when she dissolved in giggles on catching sight of the organist filing his nails during the sermon. While still in her teens she was a freelance violinist in Hollywood, playing on motion-picture soundtracks.
As skilled as she was, Ms. Tuttle contemplated giving up music altogether. The violin, too, can cause injury, and she was fast becoming a casualty. Then she attended a concert by the virtuoso violist William Primrose, and was entranced by his relaxed approach to his instrument.
She asked him for lessons. Mr. Primrose agreed, on two conditions: that she forsake the violin for the viola, and that she move to Philadelphia, where he was on the Curtis faculty. She agreed at once.
In the early 1950s, Ms. Tuttle was a member of the NBC Symphony Orchestra, a highly unusual engagement for a woman then. She made her Carnegie Recital Hall debut in 1960, in a program of Vaughan Williams, Hindemith, Bach and Brahms.
Reviewing the concert in The New York Times, Harold C. Schonberg called Ms. Tuttle “a superb instrumentalist with decided ideas.”
Besides her daughter, Ms. Heald, Ms. Tuttle is survived by her husband, Morton Herskowitz, a Reichian psychiatrist, and two grandchildren.
Ms. Tuttle was married twice before, at the ages of 18 and 25. Both marriages ended in divorce, the second one in spectacular fashion. As her daughter recounted last week, Ms. Tuttle was practicing one day when her husband ran an incriminating finger over the furniture and thrust it, dust-covered, under her nose.
Ms. Tuttle hit him over the head, though not, thankfully, with her viola. She used a frying pan.

En julio tuvimos la oportunidad de dirigir la Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional de Panamá en un concierto de música cinematográfica. El público que llenó el histórico Teatro Nacional disfrutó de la música, los visuales, los bailes y las otras sorpresas que caracterizan nuestros “VideoConciertos”.

Felicitamos a la Sinfónica Nacional, que en pocos ensayos preparó un repertorio nuevo y retante. Agradecemos también al director titular de la Orquesta, el maestro Jorge Ledezma Bradley, y al Club Activo 20-30 Las Cumbres, productores del evento benéfico, por la confianza depositada en nuestra labor.

Pueden apreciar fotos y videos del concierto en VideoConcierto.com .

Díaz es presidente de la Escuela de Música Curtis en Filadelfia. Ha sido violista principal de la Orquesta de Filadelfia, y violista de las orquestas de  Boston, Minnesota y Washington.

By MARK SWED Music Critic

A strong contender for classical CD of the year and one that early Christmas shoppers should begin stocking up on is the latest ECM release featuring the extraordinary Armenian American violist Kim Kashkashian. The disc is titled “Neharót,” after a stunningly beautiful and profoundly moving piece written for her by the Israeli composer Betty Olivero.

“Neharót Neharót” was written in 2006 in the midst of Israel’s war with Hezbollah in Lebanon. The title is Hebrew for “Rivers Rivers,” an allusion to the tears of women but also to nehar, which means ray of hope. For viola, accordion, percussion, two string ensembles and tape, it melds many sad songs, not only Jewish but Kurdish and North African, into a rapturous whole; the viola (which has a range common to the voices of women and men) is here the great healer.

Olivero’s piece is followed on Kashkashian’s CD by Tigran Mansurian’s “Three Arias (Sung out the window facing Mount Ararat),” resplendent works for solo viola and chamber orchestra by Armenia’s leading composer. This disc concludes with another beautiful Israeli work — Eitan Steinberg’s “Rava Deravin” for viola and string quartet — a haunting prayer in muted but glowing colors that finds common spiritual ground in Hasidic and Armenian song, the song of Holocaust-scarred peoples.

A warning: Do not download this recording. Buy the CD and play it through loudspeakers. This is music that embraces the world, and it needs to radiate in a space far more expansive than your cranium.

A star violist may be on the horizon. David Aaron Carpenter is a young American who makes his disc debut with recordings of a viola arrangement of Elgar’s Cello Concerto and of Alfred Schnittke’s Viola Concerto. Christoph Eschenbach, a champion of Carpenter, conducts the Philharmonia Orchestra.

Elgar’s autumnal concerto floats on air in its viola arrangement, and Carpenter has a robust sound and mercurial personality. Schnittke’s concerto, which obsesses over cadences and short motifs while making radical stylist shifts, was written for the Russian virtuoso Yuri Bashmet, perhaps the most celebrated violist of our day. Carpenter goes to town with the score.

Bashmet himself makes an appearance on a collection of Bartók concertos on Deutsche Grammophon with Pierre Boulez conducting the Berlin Philharmonic. This instant classic has Gidon Kremer playing the First Violin Concerto and Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Tamara Stefanovich tackling the Concerto for Two Pianos, Percussion and Orchestra.

The real highlight is the Viola Concerto. It is a problem piece, since Bartók died before completing it and the final score was put together by Tibor Serly from extensive sketches. For that reason — and just violists’ luck — what surely would have been the greatest viola concerto up to that time never fully materialized. But Bartók left material enough for an eloquent score to be realized, and the three Bs (Bashmet, Boulez and Berlin) elevate the composer’s final thoughts probably as high as they can go.

Quincy Porter, an American composer who died in 1966, probably is better known as an educator. He was also a violist, and if you are viola conspiracy theorist, you might suspect that the instrument was the reason for his being overlooked. Maybe it was. Much terrific American viola music, including Morton Feldman’s “The Viola in My Life” and John Harbison’s Viola Concerto, doesn’t get the attention it deserves. But the viola revival and a splendid new generation of American violists are about to change all that.

So all hail to Eliesha Nelson, a young African American violist from North Pole, Alaska (really), who has taken a fancy to Porter and recorded his complete works for viola on Dorian. She is a marvelous player, and Porter’s is marvelous music.

Porter’s Viola Concerto, written in 1948, seems to flow and flow. Its four movements are slow, fast, slow, fast, but the piece inhabits a middle path, where slow feels ever moving and fast feels like there is always time to stop and smell the roses. “Rivers, Rivers” could be a Quincy Porter title as well, except he stayed away from poetic titles. “Blues Lontains” for viola and piano was about as fancy as he got.

Nelson is a ravishing violist, and she is joined on the disc by an impressively multitalented John McLaughlin Williams, who conducts Northwest Sinfonia in the concerto, and he accompanies Nelson on viola duos for piano, harpsichord and violin. This disc is a real find.

The Irish violist Garth Knox, formerly a member of the adventurous Arditti Quartet, is now an adventurous soloist and composer in his own right. Although he has long been associated with hard-core European Modernism, he has branched out into early music playing the Baroque viola d’amore, which has sympathetic vibrating strings, as well as more folk-based new music. He put out a stunning solo CD last year that was all over the map. He has followed that with a new one, “Viola Spaces,” on Mode that is also all over the map even though this time he composed all the music.

In a series of eight etudes, he explores ways of producing sound on the viola, using up to four different instruments. He then follows that up with a series of variations on the music of Marin Marais, a Baroque French composer. In addition he offers an entertaining viola and tuba duet and a lovely fantasy for viola d’amore and five violas based on Johannes Ockegham’s 15th century music.

The hipster in the bunch is Nadia Serota, who plays solo viola music by fashionable young New York composers on “First Things First.” The disc is on New Amsterdam Records. At least I think they are fashionable young New Yorkers. There are no program notes, which are considered passé in downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn new music clubs these days. The drink menu is thought the place for description and intellectual rigor.

Nico Muhly is the featured composer on Serota’s program, and there are additional works by Judd Greenstein and Marcos Balter. All the music is facile, the products of composers in love with a few good ideas worked into the ground. But there is a good time to be had, what with these cocksure composers and Serota, who is an engagingly bouncy violist, obviously in no mood to let a little lamentation wreck their party.

The viola, they’re no doubt saying, is the future.