With his 2nd Viola Sonata from 1959, Josef Schelb (1894–1977) gave the viola a representative work with the potential for a significant concert career – despite the wealth of repertoire of this instrument, which has been popular from the Baroque to the present.

Josef Schelb, an exponent of the 20th-century's so-called 'classical modernism', knew how to use a wide range of the instrument's tonal possibilities for his typical, unmistakable personal style of those years, combining atonal-to-dode...