16 Fantasy Etudes

By Lillian Fuchs

I love this book, and really all 3 of the Fuchs etude collections. Musical, technical, challenging but do-able.

Very well written, quite musical in character. they get progressively more difficult and cover just about all you could want to study. These etudes make the viola sing!

Written by a master teacher, these pieces present their technical challenges in a concise and musical language, tonal but "stretching the ear", to use her phrase. These are the "middle" book of three books of study material, written for her own students, beginning with the "Characteristic Studies" and ending with...

the "Twelve Caprices", taking the student in increasing difficulty from the level of Kreutzer to Paganini. These are important works, written for the viola in a twentieth-century musical language, and they are not transposed violin material! They are also splendid music, which work well in performance.