Patricia Pollett
Patricia Pollett plays the viola with passion and a big, warm tone that makes the instrument sing. Her recordings run from Brahms and Bruch with orchestra to Australian chamber scores written expressly for her.
In Perihelion, the Brisbane chamber group with the unusual lineup of clarinet, viola, piano and cello, she recorded Australian scores written for the ensemble: Edwards's Ecstatic Dance, Henderson's G'Day Africa, Sabin's Points of Departure, Schultz's Dead Songs and Mephisto. Her solo programmes gather first recordings and pieces written for her, among them Kats-Chernin's six-part Still Life, Andrew Ford's Swansong, Schultz's Attack and Duo Variations, Sculthorpe's Threnody and Betty Beath's From a Quiet Place. She can be cello-rich and declamatory in a lament, lean and spare when the line wants simplicity, with a delicacy that matches the passion. With orchestra she takes Berio's orchestration of Brahms, Bruch's Romance and Schubert's Arpeggione, music that shows how much more the viola can do than elegy alone.
Patricia Pollett appears on
Old Wine, New Bottles
This disc by Floyd Williams & JANUS illustrates the cross fertilisation of folk/popular and jazz genres that occur in classical music. The original premise was to play early music (14th - 16th centuries) on modern instruments without regard for any historian's "purist" concerns.