Out of Sheer Passion for the Instrument

When you do it all for love, going against long odds and the advice of those who have been there before you, well, that’s amore, right? Or more precisely, in the case of John Anthony Calabrese, viola d’amore.

A bowed string instrument roughly the size and shape of a big, modern viola, the “viola of love” is strung in a truly weird way with two sets of metal strings, usually totaling 14. It rose to enormous popularity during the High Baroque and Classical eras, only to pass into general obscurity as tastes tilted toward the modern violin and viola. Even the period instrument movement has not done much to revive it.

“When I decided I really wanted to play this instrument and not the violin, everyone told me, ‘Don’t do it. There is no music for the instrument. You’ll starve to death,’ ” Calabrese recalls. “Well, the starving part was true, but I have found about 800 original pieces for the viola d’amore so far in libraries all over the world.”

This afternoon, Duo Calabrese--the violist and his wife, violinist Gabriela Olcese--survey some of the music rediscovered, and even composed, during Calabrese’s 30-year crusade on behalf of this unique orphan. The music ranges from a late 17th century Passacaglia by Heinrich Biber to “Roei” by contemporary Japanese composer Kikuko Massumoto.

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Born in Brooklyn, Calabrese started down the conventional musical high road as a child violinist, landing at Juilliard as a boy in the late 1950s. There he studied with the fierce Russian teacher, Ivan Galamian.

“That was a very closed environment, devoted to making violin virtuosos,” Calabrese says. “I still remember the pressure of my lessons, 8:30 Sunday mornings. Itzhak Perlman had the lesson after me and he was there warming up all the time. It was very intimidating.”

Eventually Calabrese fled Galamian’s controlling grasp for graduate freedom at Indiana University, where Josef Gingold and William Primrose were teaching. A Fulbright grant took him to Europe, where he studied with the legendary Nadia Boulanger.

“She was fantastic,” Calabrese remembers, “but there were only Americans and English in her class. The French students considered her out-of-date and were all studying with Boulez.”

Fear of the draft and Vietnam kept Calabrese in Europe. Because his grandparents were Italian, he gravitated to Italy, and his first date with the viola d’amore in 1970. In Venice, he joined conductor Claudio Scimone and the ensemble I Solisti Veneti, who were busy recording virtually the entire enormous Vivaldi catalog for the French label Erato. Vivaldi composed eight concertos for the viola d’amore, Scimone had an instrument, and the assignment fell to Calabrese.

“I liked the instrument immediately,” Calabrese says. “So much, I didn’t want to go back to the violin. It has a beautiful sound, very sweet and warm. After Juilliard and that cutthroat environment, it was so nice to take an instrument that was so unthreatening. It has something of the range and the sound of the violin, viola and cello together--all three in one.”

There are lots of violas d’amore in museums, and every one Calabrese has seen is different. The stringing is the key distinctive feature. Usually it has 14 strings--metal, not gut, which distinguishes it from the members of the viol family now found in period instrument bands. Seven of the strings are played in the usual manner and another seven run from the tailpiece to the pegbox under the fingerboard. In the proper tuning, these resonate sympathetically with the bowed strings.

The metal strings and silvery sympathetic jangle give the instrument its characteristic sound, and suggest an origin in the Middle East or the Indian subcontinent, where similarly strung instrument abound. The sound holes in the instrument, rather than the f-shape of viols and violins, are cut in a flaming sword symbol that indicates an Islamic influence.

There is also usually a carved head at the end of the instrument, a blindfolded woman or cupid, because, of course, love is blind. That flourish, and the sympathetic vibrational effect of the two sets of strings are the common reasons given for the amore moniker.

“Another very logical explanation for the name is also a possibility,” Calabrese says, “and that is that the instrument was played in brothels. It is a very soft, sweet-sounding instrument.”

Calabrese plays a modern reconstruction, and that, he says, is virtually the only way to go for the incipient violist of love--have an instrument maker custom-build one. Originals aren’t in good enough shape to be played and are seldom on the market. Besides, Calabrese says, his modern version has a bigger sound better suited to today’s halls and acoustics.

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Calabrese played with I Solisti Veneti for almost 10 years, primarily as a violinist. He left because he wanted to concentrate on the viola d’amore. He was committed enough to sell his Guadagnini violin, but he found the viola d’amore business very slow. Eventually he found a compromise that worked. He became the concertmaster of the Venice Philharmonic under conductor Peter Maag, and worked half the year with the orchestra, half on the viola d’amore in solo performances and, more recently, as Duo Calabrese, touring with his wife.

The couple maintained their home base in Venice until just last year. The position of foreign musicians in state-supported ensembles has become very precarious, he says.

“In Italy it is very difficult now. They are closing theaters and orchestras, and putting foreigners out. It is getting very nationalistic.”

He is speaking by telephone from his wife’s parents’ home in Buenos Aires, where they are living now. A native Argentine, and Calabrese’s duo partner for the last six years, Gabriela Olcese has a position there with the orchestra of the Teatro Colon, one of the world’s great opera houses.

Calabrese will join her in February when the company produces Ginastera’s opera “Bomarzo,” one of the many large-scale dramatic pieces--including Puccini’s “Madame Butterfly” and Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet”--that call for a viola d’amore solo but seldom get it.

The tradition of exploiting the distinctive color and symbolism of the viola d’amore in opera obbligatos began in the early 18th century, and carried over into works such as Bach’s “St. John” Passion and at least five of his cantatas. The tradition remained particularly strong in central Europe, and Janacek used the instrument in his operas “Katya Kabanova” and “The Makropulos Affair.”

The instrument was also Janacek’s original choice for his “Intimate Letters” String Quartet No. 2, replacing the standard viola. Calabrese’s most recent recording, with members of the Kubin Quartet for Supraphon, is this quartet of instrumental love letters.

Despite such continuing interest in the instrument by high-profile composers--almost uniformly ignored by music directors--and the boom in period instruments, generally, viola d’amore gigs have remained hard to come by for Calabrese. He has a few concerts in Italy and Japan this winter, and Los Angeles is a bright spot on his schedule. Former Los Angeles County Supervisor Edmund Edelman, an ardent amateur cellist, heard Calabrese in Italy and provided contacts here that have led to several engagements.

Last season, Calabrese played at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and UCLA’s Clark Library, and in 1998 he played one of the Vivaldi concertos and Swiss composer Frank Martin’s 1938 Sonata da Chiesa for viola d’amore and strings with Jon Robertson and the Redlands Symphony.He also gave a master class at UCLA.

And Calabrese has no plans to give up the crusade.

“Yes, the future is uncertain,” he sighs. “I can’t find a manager. ‘What is it?’ they always ask.

“I think this is like Casals with the cello or Segovia with the guitar,” he continues, “introducing an instrument as a serious solo concert attraction, changing people’s minds about it. There is so much material, so much I want to share.”

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DUO CALABRESE, Schoenberg Hall, UCLA. Dates: Today, 4 p.m. Prices: $9-$30. Phone: (310) 825-2101.