Last week we played the Martinu Rhapsody-Concerto for viola and
orchestra, and our principal violist Ute Miller played the solo part.
She’s always a great musician, and so of course she was fantastic. I
wasn’t very familiar with this piece before, but now I’m sort of unsure
about it. It’s really beautiful, but the ending of the piece is very
strange and just doesn’t make sense to me. There’s a snare drum that
plays with the viola solo and it sounds really out of place. The rest
of the orchestra is holding some long chord, I think an F chord or
something, and then for some reason we play a beat of repeated 32nd
notes on that chord. It’s just weird and out of place to my ears.