Blair School of Music viola professor Eric Wong will return to the national stage this June when he travels to Virginia for the American Viola Society (AVS) Festival, one of the country’s largest gatherings of violists. The invitation-only conference brings together performers, educators, students, and instrument makers from across the country, and Wong’s selection as one of only a handful of featured recitalists highlights both his artistry and his growing influence as a scholar-performer.
Joining Wong at the festival, hosted at James Madison University, will be Blair students John-Paul Younes and Tanav Gowda, along with Vanderbilt faculty pianist Nathan Cheung. The group will present a collaborative recital featuring selections from Beethoven’s violin sonatas transcribed for viola by Wong. Younes previously performed alongside Wong at the International Viola Congress in Paris, making this year’s recital an expansion of an ongoing artistic collaboration.
For Gowda, the trip carries an additional distinction: he has been selected as one of six finalists in the AVS senior viola competition. His program includes concerto repertoire, Bach, and a compulsory work by late Romantic composer Julia Klumpkey, all to be performed the same day as the recital.
Among the works he will perform, Gowda says Paul Hindemith’s Der Schwanendreher, a cornerstone of viola repertoire, stands out as his favorite. “I really like working on and playing Der Schwanendreher because it’s fun to pull off its sudden color changes and to portray its rhythmic insistency,” he said.
At the center of Eric Wong’s AVS appearance is a project that began soon after he joined the Blair faculty: a complete set of viola transcriptions of Beethoven’s violin sonatas. “The idea of playing something by Beethoven was really appealing to me,” Wong said. “But Beethoven didn’t write anything for viola and piano.”
Rather than accept that limitation, Wong began creating his own transcriptions. What started as a single recital idea quickly expanded into a multi-year undertaking. “We couldn’t decide which ones were our favorites,” he recalled. “So, we ended up doing a full recital of three transcriptions that I did myself.” Eventually, Wong completed all ten sonatas, a milestone he views as both an artistic and educational contribution to the viola repertoire.
His approach to transcription is intentional. Instead of simply lowering the music into a more comfortable range for viola, Wong preserves Beethoven’s original keys and piano parts, adapting only the solo line.
“The key is just so important in the character of a work,” he explained. “I think that he probably would have wanted it in the key that he conceived it in.”
That decision presents technical and expressive challenges for violists while also expanding their access to Beethoven’s music.
“Violinists and cellists get to play these sonatas from a young age,” Wong said. “They get to figure out Beethoven’s lyrical voice in a way that people who start in viola don’t get to.” His transcriptions, he added, allow violists “to be as intimately acquainted with Beethoven’s voice as violinists are.”
Beyond the performances themselves, Wong sees the festival as an important professional and artistic growth opportunity for students.
“It’s one thing to play in studio class, but to play for a room full of violists at a prestigious conference like this, I think it can be scary,” he said. “But the process has been really healthy to fine-tune things and to know the timeline and to have the nerves of steel to get up and do that.”
He also emphasized the educational value of the gathering itself.
“Probably more importantly than winning a competition is that they’ll get to see all these different teaching styles, all these different ways of thinking about music,” Wong said. “They’re going to learn a lot regardless and they’re going to have a great time.”
For Wong, the AVS Festival is more than a performance opportunity; it is a space for discovery and exchange. Describing the conference as “a big nerdy celebration of everything viola,” he sees it as a chance to introduce audiences to new repertoire and new possibilities for the instrument. Through his Beethoven transcriptions and mentorship of emerging performers, Wong is helping broaden the viola’s artistic landscape while preparing the next generation of musicians to carry it forward.
This project was made possible by a generous grant from the Peter and Lois Fyfe Faculty Excellence Fund.