Concerto for Viola
for viola and pianoforte
Click the links below to see excerpts:
S100-2008
ISMN 979 0 720073 17 0
Duration: approximately 20 minutes.
Piano score and viola part: 50.00 AUD plus shipping
In the catalogue of Alfred Hill’s music this work has the identifier 1.2.1.7 Co .
The Concerto for Viola was composed in 1940 and first performed in 1945 by Blodwen Hill and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra conducted by Henry Krips.
This concerto, one of Hill’s most admired works, has been frequently performed and the early recording with Robert Pickler and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra (HMV OALP 7524) has often been broadcast in Australia. It that performance a cadenza was inserted at bar 106 of the third movement. It was written by another violist in the SSO, George Krauss, as a tribute to the pioneering spirit and work of Alfred Hill, the doyen of Australian composers.
The opening bars of the melody at the beginning of the second movement are the same as those in the principal theme in the second movement of the Piano Quartet in A Major Op.30 by Ernest Chausson (1855-1899), in which (as in Hill’s Concerto for Viola) it is first heard on the viola. That may be a coincidence or an appropriate quote, but it was not acknowledged.
Stiles Music Publications