Word: violas
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William Bergsma is an elfin-faced, cowlicked and unabashed young man who says of himself: "I first took up the violin, didn't practice. Then the viola, didn't practice that either. So I became a composer." He has practiced that. At 29, he has to his credit a ballet suite, Paul Bunyan, half a dozen short orchestral and choral works, and two string quartets. His second quartet, composed in 1944, won him a blessing from New York critics, a National Institute of Arts and Letters grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a job teaching composition at Manhattan...
...composers, made a piano transcription of it, won more fame for Berlioz by playing it all over Germany and France. Eight years later, famed Violinist Nicolo Paganini knelt before Berlioz in public, to show his admiration for Harold in Italy, a Berlioz symphony which is almost a concerto for viola. More important for the impecunious Berlioz, Paganini made him a gift of 20,000 francs...
...last acts of frail, white-haired Composer Bela Bartok before his death in 1945 was to complete a viola concerto for William Primrose. In the University of Minnesota's Northrop Memorial Auditorium last week, a near-capacity crowd brought Violist Primrose back onstage six times with thunderous applause. With Conductor Antal Dorati's Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra, he had given the first public performance of Bartok's tragic, lyrical swan song...
...cracking labor trying to decipher the piece. Serly later said: "No man ever had such a task in his life . . . In order to finish this work as Bartok would have finished it, I had to put myself in a dead man's mind." Serly completed the score for viola (after rejecting the notion of adapting it for the more popular cello) and worked out the full orchestration...
...dance at the end. Wrote Tribune Critic Norman Houk: "The Bartok concerto was a major success ... It was given an alert, keyed-up performance by a soloist, orchestra and conductor who had been working on the complex score for a strenuous week . . . A permanent and important addition to the viola repertory...