Original Soviet Viola Repertoire #1
 

Wait, there’s more Soviet viola music besides Shostakovich and Schnittke?

By Netanel E. Pollak, DMA
 

Greetings beautiful viola community, it is my pleasure to share with you some fruits of my decade-long research. Please allow me to introduce myself: my name is Netanel Pollak, I am a viola player from Jeru

salem, Israel. During my Master’s studies at Juilliard I started exploring lesser-known viola repertoire from the USSR, researched, and performed with great joy the Khachaturian Solo Sonata, and the Bunin Concerto.
 

For me, researching Soviet music was a way to reconnect to my family’s past, and their Exodus from the USSR in the 1970’s. From a young age, I realized that besides the great Shostakovich and Prokofiev, there are many more composers and musical works that convey a narrative to be shared with the world. A narrative of repression and uncompromising heroism: sometimes by actively fighting the surrounding forces of evil, and sometimes by simply surviving, create happy music under fear, deficit, and uncertainty.

After my first Juilliard experiences, I kept discovering and performing more unknown viola works from the Soviet Era, and when the time was right (during Co

vid, of course, when other opportunities were so limited), I started a DMA at the University of Miami. My goal was to put more recitals of Soviet music, and create a modest catalogue of original Soviet viola compositions. I limited myself to works that were composed in any of the 15 republics that constituted the USSR, during the years that they were part of the Union (maximally ranging between 1917-1991), feature the viola as a main instrument, and are originally written for the viola, and not a transcription of a work by another composer made by a violist.

My initial assumption was to find a few dozens of works, catalogue them, and accompany the catalogue with some historiographic threads. The discovery of one work lead to another, and somehow by the submission of the dissertation my catalogue included more than 320 works, annotated to the best of my ability, along with a massive historiographic chapter—that goes far beyond the names that might be familiar to the Western reader, such as Borisovsky, Druzhinin, or Bashmet—and an essay on how to approach Soviet music as modern-day Western players.

Since my graduation, I have been sharing my research in different platforms, which include four articles published at the Journal of the American Viola Society, presentation at musicological conferences across the world, and in viola congresses. This January, I presented a solo sonata by Boris Asafiev at the 50^th IVS-Congress in Paris, composed for Alexandr Ryvkin: one of the most influential violists in St. Petersburg/Leningrad of the early 20^th century, completely forgotten today. In June, at the AVS Festival in Harrisonburg, VA, I performed another solo sonata, titled ‘Genesis’ by Azerbaijani composer Khayyam Mirzazade, aiming to spotlight composers of underrepresented backgrounds.
 

Thanks to the inspiring proactivity of the IVS administration, that invests in documenting and preserving past and present viola literature, and the history of our community, I was fortunate to become part of the Music4Viola project, and start generating new entries about Soviet works for viola. It is my hope to share as many works as possible, and enlarge the viola shelf. In my next blogs I will tell you more about new entries, and share some recommendations for lovely works to consider for your next engagements. Works that can sound voices that had been silenced for years: the voices of those who lived under impossible repression, and dreamed of a better future.