I promise not to open this review with a viola joke. Okay, just one: What do you call someone who hangs around musicians a lot? A viola player. Okay, another: What's the difference between a violist and a dog? The dog knows when to stop scratching. Sorry, I digress. But if you've ever played in an orchestra, you are familiar with the lamentable social position of the viola — awkward, neither-here-nor-there, a continual butt of (bad) jokes, the perennial red-headed stepchild of the classical world. What you don't realize is that the viola is cooler than all of you. The viola is Ally Sheedy in The Breakfast Club, and you all are Emilio Estevez. Live it up now, because in ten years or so you are going to be working middle management somewhere outside Cleveland while the viola attends gallery openings in the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

Nadia Sirota knows this. She understands that this portly, awkward instrument has a secret emotional life, and she has the gumption and vision to believe that the person to show it to the world is her. On her solo debut First Things First — for the always-offbeat, always-interesting New Amsterdam Records — she… read more »