Released
How did the viola, a preferred instrument of Mozart, Schubert, Dvorak, and Hindemith, became the butt of so much lowbrow orchestral humor? No answers will be found in this 1991 ECM album from the Swiss composer Walter Fähndrich, an hour-long odyssey of bone-chilling harmonics, eerie arpeggios, and spectral sul tasto (bowing over the fingerboard) that present the viola as an implement of brooding experimentalism and sheer terror.