• reflexionas sobre tus propios procesos mentales (metacognición).
• empleas la práctica mental en combinación con la práctica física.
• practicas organizadamente y con objetivos precisos.
• estudias y analizas las partituras.
• realizas prácticas cortas y frecuentes.
• estás intrínsecamente motivado (practicas por tu propio gusto).
• escuchas grabaciones o ves demostraciones de tu profesor.

Durante este mes estaremos desarrollando estas ideas para que puedas incorporarlas a tu práctica.

Roberto Milano (1936-2005)

El Concerto para viola y orquesta de cuerdas de Roberto Milano se estrenó en octubre de 2005 por Emanuel Olivieri y la Camerata Filarmónica dirigida por el profesor Francisco Cabán. Fue compuesto por una comisión del solista. Desafortunadamente el maestro Milano no pudo escucharlo ya que se nos fue inesperadamente en febrero de ese mismo año.

Siendo el primer concierto para viola escrito en Puerto Rico, se trata de una obra extensa y de gran profundidad. El compositor lo conceptualizó como parte de un tríptico que tituló Visiones proféticas, el cual incluye además un concierto para piano y una sinfonía. Se divide en cuatro movimientos: preludio, romanza, rondó y elegía.

La siguiente grabación del Preludio fue realizada en la Sala Sanromá del Conservatorio de Música de Puerto Rico junto con estudiantes del Conservatorio. Próximamente iremos publicando los demás movimientos. Milano Viola Concert String Orchestra

A continuación un resumen de los temas mencionados en la clase:

Meditación de la ópera Thaïs de Jules Massenet.

Se discutieron las variables en la producción del sonido: carril, peso y velocidad del arco, y cómo utilizarlas para moldear la interpretación de la pieza. Se recalcó la importancia de hacerle caso a todas las indicaciones que el compositor escribe en la partitura. También se presentó la idea de escoger una nota para dirigir la intensidad en cada frase, y evitar los acentos no intencionales en el arco. Comenzar el arco legato con un aterrizaje circular del arco sobre la cuerda.

Concierto en sol mayor de Telemann, segundo movimiento

Se recalcó la importancia de tocar de memoria para tener más control de la técnica y no distraerse con la lectura de los signos musicales. Para la memorización se recomendó dividir la pieza en bloques pequeños. Para mejorar la afinación se debe trabajar el pasaje muy lentamente, pero con golpes de arco cortos y fuertes (martelé); usar el tiempo entre cada nota para evaluar la precisión de la nota anterior, y preparar el dedo de la nota siguiente.

Tonalización: se debe usar todo el arco, con sonido fuerte.

Los meñiques en ambas manos suelen tensarse y causar problemas. En la mano izquierda debe caer cuadrado como los demás dedos.  Para fortalecerlo se recomiendo el ejercicio de lanzar el dedo rápidamente y elevarlo lentamente (usar el tercer dedo como ancla).

En la mano izquierda el meñique también debe estar curvo. No elevar la mano por encima de la vara. Ejercico de la araña y de “push-ups” para flexibilizar y fortalecer los dedos.

Producción de sonido: ejercicio de tocar notas largas con cuerdas al aire (llegar hasta 18 segundos por arcada). Lograr el máximo sonido posible pero sin perder la calidad.

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.

Te esperamos el 28 de noviembre en la Escuela Libre de Música de San Juan para la continuación del taller. Si no fuiste pero te interesa participar todavía estás a tiempo de inscribirte. Envíanos un mensaje con tu email a:

Concierto de Violistas en Museo de Caparra

El pasado 27 de septiembre celebramos ante sala llena el Concierto de Violistas en el Museo de las Ruinas de Caparra. Cada estudiante interpretó una pieza como solista y luego todos interpretaron la Fantasia de York Bowen, el Concierto de Brandenburgo núm. 6 de Bach (primer movimiento), y piezas populares de Rafael Hernández y Morel Campos arregladas por los mismos estudiantes.

Agradecemos a la directora del museo, señora Carmen Teresa Ríos, por su invitación, y al programa de museos del Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña.