By Miranda Wilson | From the July-August 2024 issue of Strings Magazine
This new album by Hsin-Yun Huang and Pei-Yao Wang presents a collection of arrangements and transcriptions for viola and piano. These include Meng-Hsun Chung’s arrangement of Erich Korngold’s incidental music for Much Ado About Nothing, Roger Tapping’s transcription of Alban Berg’s 4 Stücke, Op. 5 (originally for the clarinet), and Huang’s own transcriptions of four lieder from Dvořák’s In Folk Tone, Op. 73, and the second of Beethoven’s cello sonatas, Opus 102.
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There is no apparent theme to this collection of works; rather, the performers seem to have chosen some favorites that they thought would work well on viola and piano. For the most part, they do. The relatively little-known Korngold work will be a welcome addition to the viola literature, and like many clarinet works (Brahms’ sonatas spring to mind), Berg’s Opus 5 is never less than convincing on viola.
Transcribing lieder for instruments is always a risk, however, as losing the poetic text can risk losing the meaning of the whole composition. The Dvořák cycle sounds agreeable enough on the viola, but anyone familiar with the composer’s surprisingly dark choices of texts will miss them here. The Beethoven transcription is less successful, as the composer’s hyper-specific timbral choices tend not to translate well to other instruments. Huang and Wang play capably throughout, though a distracting amount of reverb in the production obscures some of the nuance and skews the balance in favor of the viola.
It’s a pity that the poorly translated liner notes contain many spelling and formatting errors that ChatGPT could have fixed in an instant, because they let down an otherwise bold attempt to expand the 19th- and 20th-century viola literature.
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