Music: Viola and Primrose

The viola is in nature an undersized pansy. In art it is an oversized violin with a tubby, whiskey-contralto voice. Except for low-moaning the inner voices of symphonies and string quartets, it is not good for much. Most of the time it merely plays pah to the cello’s oom. Most of the people who pull horsehair bows over its goatgut strings are ex-violinists who failed to make the grade.

No such second-grader is athletic, tooth-brush-mustached William Primrose, who plays the principal viola part in Arturo Toscanini’s NBC Symphony. Last week Primrose temporarily added himself to the world-famed Budapest Quartet (TIME, Nov. 13) to play quintets for Manhattan’s persnickety New Friends of Music.

He had also just completed 20 solo records for Victor, and the Primrose Quartet, of which he is boss and viola player, had just muscled in on the front rank of U. S. chamber-music organizations. For him a half-dozen of the world’s leading composers (including Paul Hindemith, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Arnold Bax, William Walton) were busy writing viola sonatas, viola concertos.

When he was a little boy in Glasgow 30 years ago William Primrose loved to saw away at an old viola that was around the house. His father, who was himself a disappointed viola player, strongly objected, set little William to practicing the violin instead. But William never forgot the charms of the forbidden viola. Years later, in Brussels, when his teacher, the late great violinist and tosspot Eugene YsaŸe, told William he had special aptitude for the viola, he switched to it for life. In 1937, when NBC officials were recruiting their new NBC Symphony, they heard a phonograph record of Violist Primrose playing a Paganini caprice. Never had they heard or heard tell of such fast & fluent viola playing, at first thought some super-brilliant violinist like Jascha Heifetz had made the record under an assumed name. They telegraphed Primrose, then on tour with the London String Quartet, and offered him the job of Toscanini’s chief viola player. He accepted.

Sober, methodical and coolheaded, Violist Primrose is no sissy. His evenings are spent, not at musical tea parties, but at Manhattan’s Madison Square Garden. Once a good boxer himself, still an avid connoisseur of right hooks and straight lefts, he no longer dares to get into the ring for fear of hurting his hands. Today, Primrose is generally considered the world’s finest viola player. No longer does he have to play one-night stands, traipsing through snowdrifts to theatres and hotels in out-of-the-way Canadian and Midwestern towns. He reaches a bigger audience in one concert than he could in 15 years of barnstorming, and without any more discomfort than it takes to step from a subway into a cozy broadcasting studio. “It makes you feel like an orchid,” says William Primrose.