Throughout this season Jörg Widman is composer-performer in residence at Wigmore Hall, so this is a good time to find out more about his music. The German composer’s own instrument is the clarinet, ...

Later this month, violist Lawrence Power will perform the Scottish premiere of Anders Hillborg’s Viola Concerto with the SCO. He tells Ken Walton how the Fab Four ended up in the mix Did you know with ...

Béla Bartók is the undisputed master among these three Hungarian composers of works for viola and orchestra. In the world of the viola, Tibor Serly (1901-78) is best-known as the man who made a ...

Poor viola! Neglected and ridiculed for centuries this (really very lovely) instrument has been the receiving end of many a joke and jibe. Berlioz, who had a soft spot for the viola, believed it to be ...

Few violists are born. Most have the instrument thrust upon them. In fact, the viola -- the overlooked stepchild of the orchestra’s string section -- is rarely studied as a first instrument at all.

Naxos’s valuable and ongoing Penderecki series here couples the Second Cello Concerto of 1982 and the Viola Concerto of 1983. Penderecki made his reputation in the late 1950s as a master of striking, ...

"People sometimes think playing the viola is boring," muses Teng Li, the newly appointed principal violist of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. "Traditionally, the viola has been considered a 'filler' ...

Let’s not beat about the bush: it takes something to make Elgar’s Cello Concerto work on the viola, to make it convincing even in those moments where a transposition up into the viola’s higher ...

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. The premiere of Brett Dean’s Hamlet at Glyndebourne in 2017 had a resonance beyond that initial production. The ...

David Owen Norris chooses his favourite recording of William Walton's Viola Concerto. It was conductor Sir Thomas Beecham's suggestion that Walton should write a viola concerto for the virtuoso Lionel ...

What’s the difference between a viola and a trampoline? You take your shoes off to jump on a trampoline. Those damn viola jokes! Though usually good-natured and funny, they nonetheless belittle a ...