Conrad Zwicky

Orchesteretüden - Viola

From the foreword (by Doris Diestelhorst)
Conrad Zwicky's music is characterized by its great practical relevance. Here is a musician whose everyday life is musical in the truest sense of the word: Zwicky is a composer, performer (instrumentalist and conductor) and teacher. He has a sense for the concrete and the feasible.[...]
In the Four Orchestral Etudes for String Orchestra (1992), the composer pulls out all the stops to offer a textbook-like panopticon of strokes. In their quasi-cyclical symphonic structure, the four pieces evoke associations with classical symphonic movements in their dialectical interplay. The first étude, which emphasizes excitement and propulsive motor skills and is reminiscent of film music, is juxtaposed with the very spacious, melodic second étude, which is characterized by its mysterious tremolo flickering at the beginning and has the effect of a slow second symphonic movement. Etude number three, spiced with a good dose of humor, plays with rhythmic shifts and sound effects and makes the finale of the fourth piece seem toccata-like and reminiscent.
Stitched edition.