Nikolai Kapustin Sweet Georgia Brown Variations op 107
for viola and voice, alto sax, double bass and piano

Buy Nikolai Kapustin Sweet Georgia Brown

Sweet Georgia Brown is a jazz standard composed in 1925 by Ben Bernie and Maceo Pinkard. Here is the Wynton Marsalis Quintet in their version

The Kapustin variations on Sweet Georgia Brown are something else!

Buy Nikolai Kapustin Sweet Georgia Brown

This work has an interesting history. In 2002 Kapustin wrote a Suite, op 106, for the unusual but rather lovely combination of viola, alto saxophone, piano and double bass. At the request of his dedicatee, the violist Svetlana Stepchenko, he then composed the Sweet Georgia Brown Variations, op 107, for the same instruments, intended to be an encore piece for the Suite. The Variations, which are directly based on Ben Bernie and Maceo Pinkard's famous jazz standard, were tried out by a number of musicians, but nobody could continue much beyond bar 104 - about two-thirds of the way through. At this point Kapustin instructs the viola player to stop playing and indulge himself or herself - and the audience - in about 30 bars of scat singing. If the violist is male, then the passage has to be sung falsetto. It should be pointed out that Stepchenko, a fine violist who has played in other recordings of Kapustin's string chamber works, also has a lovely singing voice. The problem was that as soon as the viola player began to sing everyone else would collapse into laughter and the performance had to be abandoned.

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Buy Nikolai Kapustin Sweet Georgia Brown