Penn State violist Timothy Deighton
joins American String Quartet in concert

A Kiwi will team with the Yankees when violist Timothy Deighton, an associate professor of music at Penn State and a native of New Zealand, performs a renowned Brahms viola quintet with the American String Quartet at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, October 17, in Schwab Auditorium.

The concert features Brahms’ Quintet in G Major, Op. 111, with Deighton as second violist. The American String Quartet is also scheduled to perform Haydn’s Quartet in D Minor, Op. 76, No. 2, and Shostakovich’s Quartet in F Major, Op. 73, No. 3. 

During the 2008–2009 season, Deighton and the American String Quartet will come together again at Schwab to perform Brahms’ Quintet in F Major, Op. 88, Spring.

“Brahms, I think, was always really… attracted to middle instruments, instruments in that middle range,” Deighton says. “What I think he was looking for was this very rich, dark kind of middle sound. And I think the G Major definitely has that.”

Composers through the centuries have written string quintets with differing instrumental configurations.

“The most common probably is where you have two violas, but there is a very famous one by Schubert, of course, for two cellos. And sometimes there’s even a bass,” Deighton observes. “It’s been quite a popular sort of genre. A lot of the great composers have written for it. Mozart wrote six. Mendelssohn wrote a couple. Dvorák wrote a couple. Beethoven even wrote a couple. But Brahms’ [are] certainly considered two of the great, really great, quintets.”

The idea for the Deighton-American collaboration took root in fall 2005 in discussions between Daniel Avshalomov, the American’s violist, and George Trudeau, director of the Center for the Performing Arts at Penn State. Avshalomov and Trudeau grew up together in Portland, Oregon.

“From the beginning, Dan proposed involving Tim Deighton to expand the program possibilities to include works from the rich and varied viola quintet repertoire,” Trudeau recalls. “After going back and forth a bit on program ideas, we settled on performing over two seasons the Brahms viola quintets involving Tim as the second violist.”

American String Quartet, now in its thirty-second season, is recognized as one of the world’s most accomplished string ensembles. The quartet, making its third visit to Penn State in five years, has performed at most of the important concert halls around the globe.

The American, which performed Beethoven quartets on its last visit to Penn State in 2004, embodies the many qualities of a first-rate chamber ensemble. The quartet members are great collaborative musicians. But violinists Peter Winograd and Laurie Carney, violist Avshalomov, and cellist Wolfram Koessel are also educators, innovators, champions of new music, soloists, and more.

The New York City-based quartet has been making music since 1974, when its original members were students at The Juilliard School. The quartet, which has performed in each of the fifty states, in Asia, and on annual tours of Europe, has been the resident quartet at the Aspen Music Festival since 1974 and the Manhattan School of Music since 1984.

Deighton has never performed with the American, but he has shared a stage with Avshalomov. The New York Viola Society presented the pair in a concert last year.

“Dan and I shared a recital in December,” Deighton says. “He played the first half with his pianist, and my duo played the second half. …We [had] commissioned a work for two violas, and gave the premiere in between the two halves.”

Deighton and Avshalomov met at Penn State. “The American quartet’s been here several times before, and I went to one of the concerts and really enjoyed it,” Deighton recalls. “We got to talking afterwards and the various members of the quartet came and gave master classes in the School of Music. So Dan gave a viola class for some of my students. He’s a fantastic teacher.”

In addition to their obvious connection as violists, Deighton says, they discovered a shared love of nature. “We also found that we had a common interest in the great outdoors. He’s from the Pacific Northwest and I’m from New Zealand, of course, so we traded all kinds of hiking stories and that sort of thing.”

Deighton came to the United States in 1989. He had completed a couple of degrees and been a violinist with the New Zealand Symphony. “But I knew I wanted to see the world and get more training,” he explains.

He earned an artist diploma at The Hartt School of the University of Hartford in Connecticut, then headed to the University of Kansas to seek a doctorate.

“It was during that time out there, when I was doing my doctorate, that I started playing the viola seriously,” Deighton says. “In fact, what happened was I was doing a doctorate in violin, and I was trying to find ways to get out of doing any more papers. So I conned the graduate committee into letting me do viola lessons. I took one lesson and I thought, ‘What the hell am I doing playing the violin?’ And that was it really. So I ended up earning a degree in both instruments.”

The switch from violin to viola was a natural transition. “I’m reasonably tall, and I found the violin pretty tiny,” he says. “I struggled trying to play an instrument that small. I found the viola physically easier to handle. And I’ve always been attracted to the sound of the instrument. I always like that dark lower register. Perhaps most importantly, I’ve always enjoyed the role of viola, particularly in chamber music. I never really felt temperamentally suited to the first violin part.”

In addition to teaching viola and chamber music, Deighton directs the Penn State Viola Ensemble. He performs as a soloist, chamber musician, and guest with orchestras.

He has performed U.S. and international premieres of many works by contemporary composers. He’s attracted to contemporary works, in part, because it allows him to be on the cutting edge of a comparatively young repertoire.

“The viola sort of really came into its own during the twentieth century,” he notes. “Before that composers tended to write more for violin and to some extent cello. There [were] some wonderful works written before the twentieth century, but certainly most of our repertoire, certainly solo repertoire, comes from the twentieth century onward.”

Deighton spends much of his time performing in an unorthodox ensemble. “Most of the chamber work that I do on a consistent basis is a duo with a saxophonist, which again is a lot of commissioning of new works,” he says.

His partner in the contemporary-music duo, The Irrelevants, is saxophonist Carrie Koffman, an adjunct professor at The Hartt School. They met when Koffman was an assistant professor at Penn State. The duo’s unusual name comes from the underdog nature of the instruments that Deighton and Koffman play.

He also performs in recitals with his wife Ann Deighton, a pianist whom he met when both were pursuing doctorates at the University of Kansas.

Artistic Viewpoints, an informal moderated discussion featuring violist Daniel Avshalomov, is offered in Schwab Auditorium one hour before the performance and is free for ticket holders.