Postcard from... MUNICH

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Carlos María Solare reports from the wide-ranging and eventful second edition of the Hindemith International Viola Competition

Back for its second iteration, the Hindemith International Viola Competition (HIVC) took place from 8 to 15 October 2025 at the history-charged main building of the Hochschule für Musik und Theater, which had been built in 1930 as the Nazi Party’s Munich headquarters. Having attended the event four years ago (see The Strad, January 2022), I was pleased to take in an exhibition honouring both its eponymous composer and Walter Witte (1928–2020), the founder of the competition in its original guise in 1996. By profession a lawyer, Witte was a gifted artist and a passionate amateur violist. The exhibition, titled ‘For the Love of the Viola’, showed a selection of his drawings and offered much information about Hindemith’s concert career as a viola soloist. It provided a fascinating insight into both men, and perhaps went some way to exorcising the infamous legacy of the space it occupied.

HIVC artistic director Roland Glassl, viola professor at the university, recruited an international jury headed by Hartmut Rohde (Berlin University of the Arts) and featuring Veronika Hagen, Hsin-Yun Huang, Garth Knox, Paul Pesthy, Geneviève Strosser and flautist Henrik Wiese, with music education specialist Sonja Stibi joining them for the semi-final round. The bill of fare for the quarter-finals consisted of contrasting movements from unaccompanied works by Bach and Hindemith, and a specially commissioned work by German composer Isabel Mundry. The new piece (Komposition für Viola) is a demanding exercise in sophisticated microtonal playing, during which the violist is additionally required to wander through constantly varying contact points between extreme sul ponticello and sul tasto. It was fascinating to see how the 16 quarter-finalists coped with this extremely – and, arguably, unnecessarily – complicated work. Some seemed to concentrate either on the microtones or the changing contact points to the detriment of the other elements, but each was able to weld the three contrasting movements into a convincing whole.