Viola Aotearoa
Timothy Deighton

US-based NZ violist Timothy Deighton gives virtuoso presentations of modern NZ repertoire for viola, including three previously unrecorded works.

Timothy Deighton is Assistant Professor of Viola at Penn State University, where he also teaches chamber music, viola pedagogy and literature, and is violist of the Castalia Ensemble. A New Zealander by birth, he received a Bachelor of Music and First Class Honours degree from Victoria University of Wellington, an Artist Diploma from the Hartt School of Music at the University of Hartford, and a Doctor of Musical Arts degree in violin and viola from the University of Kansas. He is a National Recording Artist for Radio New Zealand, and was a member of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra.

Deighton maintains a busy performing schedule as a soloist, chamber, and orchestral musician, and is very active as a teacher and clinician. A regular contributor to musical periodicals, his articles have appeared in such publications as Strings, the American String Teacher, Journal of the American Viola Society, the New York Violist, and VIOLOZ (Australian and New Zealand Viola Society Journal). In 1999 he directed 'ViolaFest',a three-day event at Penn State which involved more than 200 violists from across North America and abroad.

Having long held a fascination for new music, Deighton has performed U.S., European, and International premieres of numerous works by contemporary composers, several of which were commissioned by or written for him. In April 2001 he was featured as an invited performer at the XXVIII International Viola Congress, where he performed several of the works appearing on this disc. During the summer he serves on the faculty of the International Musical Arts Institute at Fryeburg, Maine, and he has performed at other festivals including Yellowbarn, the Hampden-Sydney Music Festival, and Music at Penn's Woods. His teachers have included Ben Sayevich, Eric Rosenblith, Michael Kimber, and Gavin Saunders.

REVIEW BY PETER MECHEN