Nadia Sirota, First Things First

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 proves it to be true, with a thrillingly fractured and impressionistic suite of works that will appeal to anyone who savored the Japanese-calligraphy starkness of Nico Muhly's Mothertongue or the flotsam-heavy sound collages of The Books. Although there are a few faint, glowing brushes of synthesizer color on the canvas, for the most part, Sirota's viola is the star of this show, and she takes every opportunity available to show off the instrument's limitless possibilities. The evocatively titled opening track "Chorale Pointing Downwards" — written, in fact, by Muhly — is the showcase, shifting restlessly from fat, meaty plunking to the insectoid shimmering of her bow trembling strings to tracing ghostly wisps of sound.

Elsewhere, she jigs her way through "Etude 1a," in which Muhly dips a jaunty Celtic reel in the kind of harmonic acid Prokofiev often used to curdle folk dances, then skips her way across a spiky landscape of sforzandos (sudden, violent accents) on Judd Greenstein's "Escape." It's enough of a revelation to make all those hoary old viola jokes (what do you get when you cross a viola player with a sheep? A sheep that plays out of tune and has lousy time) start to seem like plain old sour grapes.