Antoine Tamestit remains undeterred in his mission to champion the viola

For Antoine Tamestit, discovering the viola as a young, wanna-be string player was a Goldilocks moment that changed his life.

When he was 5, the Paris native began taking violin lessons, but he soon found himself longing for an instrument with a lower register. When he was 9 or 10, he tried the cello. But the youngster quickly realized that it didn’t suit him, either. So his violin teacher showed him the viola, and it immediately felt just right.

“I didn’t see the instrument with its limitations of repertoire, I saw it with the right tessiture [range] for me,” he said. “ It was just a bigger violin. It was just a compromise between two worlds that I loved — violin and cello. It was more my tessiture, one that resonated inside of me. And to this to this day, it is my favorite instrument.”

Tamestit has become one of the few full-time viola soloists in the classical-music world. He made his debut with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in September 2024, and he will return Oct. 16-18 to serve as soloist in Hector Berlioz’s Harold en Italie (Harold in Italy), a four-movement orchestra work in which the viola serves as kind of musical protagonist.

The viola is getting an unusual spotlight moment at the start of the CSO’s 2025-26 season, with this program coming about a month after the ensemble’s principal viola, Teng Li, is featured Sept. 18-19 in Mozart’s Sinfonia concertante for violin, viola and orchestra. She will be featured alongside violinist and guest conductor Nikolaj Szeps-Znaider.  

Unlike the oft-heard works written for the piano, violin or cello, orchestras rarely feature viola concertos, and when they do, they often have their own principal violist take the solo role, as Li is doing in the Sinfonia concertante. But Tamestit has doggedly carved out a solo career, not so much to be a musical star, but instead to showcase this instrument he loves so much.

“I decided to not stop whenever I faced complications from promoters or orchestras who thought that they could not really invite a viola soloist,” he said. “I just found ways and different repertoire — new music and transcriptions — and just explained that passion for the instrument until I got what I have today, which is exactly what I dreamed of. I couldn’t be happier.”

Tamestit devotes about 30 to 40 percent of his time to chamber music, including solo recitals, and the rest is spent performing concertos with orchestras all over the world. In 2023-24, he made debuts with three of the world’s most celebrated ensembles: the Berlin Philharmonic, New York Philharmonic and Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam. “I felt very lucky,” he said. “In a way, it’s strange that at my age — I’m now 46 years old — that I still do debuts as if I were a very young artist.”

But Tamestit thinks the timing of these debuts couldn’t be better. When he joined the Berlin Philharmonic, for example, he already knew many of the musicians from other projects, and they couldn’t believe that he hadn’t played with the orchestra previously. “I felt much better — if I may say with a lot of respect and admiration — because it’s a bunch of my friends who I get to play with and I felt comfortable and excited to play with them. It’s not something completely unknown and scary.”

On Sept. 4-5, with the Cleveland Orchestra, Tamestit will perform Joe Hisaishi’s Viola Saga for Orchestra. In 2023, in Tokyo, Tamestit debuted the work by the acclaimed Japanese composer, and he’s featured in it on a 2024 Deutsche Grammophon recording titled “Joe Hisaishi in Vienna.”

Since 2008, he has played what is believed to be the first viola constructed by Antonio Stradivari, one of the most celebrated luthiers ever. The 1672 instrument is on loan from the Habisreutinger Foundation in Switzerland. Only 11 violas (or 12, depending how one is classified) by Stradivari exist, and just a few of those are played regularly. Tamestit called his a “very special one,” and in some ways, it was a kind of experimental instrument because the maker used poplar for the instrument’s back instead of the usual maple, which gives it a warmer color with lower frequencies and slower vibrations. In addition, it has a slightly unusual shape, being flatter, wider and not quite as long as many typical violas. The soloist praised its “warm and brilliant sound” and said that it “wants to sing on every string.”  

One of the problems for violists is the lack of significant concertos, compared to the many written for violin or piano. To help fill that void, Tamestit has actively premiered works for the instrument, including his debut with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in 2023-24 of Italian composer Francesco Filidei’s Viola Concerto. Tamestit acknowledges that he didn’t completely understand the piece when he was practicing it on his own, but the minute, he joined the orchestra for rehearsals, everything made sense and he immediately appreciated its dramaturgical ideas and orchestral colors.

“It’s just a magical piece,” he said. “It’s so virtuosic but it’s also so funny. It has seven movements that actually are a sort of viola joke, but in the best way.  It’s like a viola player who discovers playing and discover its [the instrument’s] abilities and sounds.”

He also praised Jörg Widmann’s Viola Concerto, which Tamestit premiered in 2015 with the Orchestre de Paris. “I think those two pieces really stand out and are really incredible,” he said.

For his Chicago debut last year, Tamestit played one of the most popular and frequently heard solo works written for the instrument: William Walton’s Viola Concerto, which the English composer wrote in 1929. Only Harold in Italy is played more often, but it is not strictly speaking a concerto.

Berlioz’s work was inspired at least in part by Lord Byron’s long narrative poem, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, published in 1812-18. “My intention was to write a series of orchestral scenes,” Berlioz wrote in his memoirs, “in which the solo viola would be involved as a more or less active participant while retaining its own character. By placing it among the poetic memories formed from my wanderings in the Abruzzi [a region in southern Italy], I wanted to make the viola a kind of melancholy dreamer in the manner of Byron’s Childe Harold.”

Tamestit’s first trip to the Chicago area came in 2001, when he won first prize in the well-respected Primrose International Viola Competition, which was founded in 1979 by the American Viola Society. That year’s edition of the contest occurred at Elmhurst College, and he met Charles Pikler, then the CSO’s principal violist, who served on the jury. In addition to that connection, Tamestit had long followed the CSO through its recordings, including a 1996 album that features Sibelius’ Violin Concerto with soloist Maxim Vengerov, then music-director Daniel Barenboim on the podium and Pikler playing some key viola solos.

Tamestit suspects he will likely be back again with the CSO in the future, because he is “very close” with Klaus Mäkelä, the Finnish conducting sensation announced in April 2024 as the ensemble’s next music director, starting in 2027-28. “I couldn’t feel more lucky about that,” he said.