That doesn't mean we need pity the violist. There are several fine soloists on the scene, much new viola music being written, and neglected earlier viola music being rediscovered. The viola has become hip in new music clubs. And many CDs have come out to prove all this. A strong contender for classical CD of the year is the latest ECM release featuring the extraordinary Armenian-American violist Kim Kashkashian. The disc is titled 'Neharot,' after a stunningly beautiful and profoundly moving piece written for her by Israeli composer Betty Olivero. 'Neharot Neharot' was written in 2006 in the midst of Israel's war with Hezbollah in Lebanon. The title is Hebrew for 'Rivers Rivers,' an allusion to the tears of women but also to nehar, which means ray of hope. For viola, accordion, percussion, two string ensembles and tape, it melds many sad songs, not only Jewish but Kurdish and North African, into a rapturous whole; the viola is here the great healer. Olivero's piece is followed by Tigran Mansurian's 'Three Arias (Sung out the window facing Mount Ararat),' resplendent works for solo viola and chamber orchestra by Armenia's leading composer. The disc concludes with another beautiful Israeli work: Eitan Steinberg's 'Rava Deravin' for viola and string quartet -- a haunting prayer in muted but glowing colors that finds common spiritual ground in Hasidic and Armenian song. A warning: Do not download this recording. Buy the CD and play it through loudspeakers. This is music that embraces the world, and it needs to radiate in a space more expansive than your cranium. A star violist may be on the horizon. David Aaron Carpenter is a young American who makes his disc debut with recordings of a viola arrangement of Elgar's Cello Concerto and of Alfred Schnittke's Viola Concerto. Christoph Eschenbach, a champion of Carpenter, conducts the Philharmonia Orchestra. Elgar's autumnal concerto floats on air in its viola arrangement, and Carpenter has a robust sound and mercurial personality. Schnittke's concerto, which obsesses over cadences and short motifs while making radical stylist shifts, was written for the Russian virtuoso Yuri Bashmet, perhaps the most celebrated violist of our day. Bashmet himself makes an appearance on a collection of Bartok concertos on Deutsche Grammophon with Pierre Boulez conducting the Berlin Philharmonic. This instant classic has Gidon Kremer playing the First Violin Concerto and Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Tamara Stefanovich tackling the Concerto for Two Pianos, Percussion and Orchestra. The real highlight is the Viola Concerto. It is a problem piece, since Bartok died before completing it and the final score was put together by Tibor Serly from extensive sketches. But Bartok left material enough for an eloquent score to be realized, and the three B's (Bashmet, Boulez and Berlin) elevate the composer's final thoughts. (Begin optional trim) Quincy Porter, an American composer who died in 1966, probably is better known as an educator. He also was a violist, and if you are a viola conspiracy theorist, you might suspect that the instrument was the reason for his being overlooked. Much terrific American viola music, including Morton Feldman's 'The Viola in My Life' and John Harbison's Viola Concerto, doesn't get the attention it deserves. But the viola revival and a splendid new generation of American violists are about to change that. So all hail Eliesha Nelson, a young violist from North Pole, Alaska, who has taken a fancy to Porter and recorded his complete works for viola on Dorian. Porter's Viola Concerto, written in 1948, seems to flow and flow. Its four movements are slow, fast, slow, fast, but the piece inhabits a middle path, where slow feels ever moving and fast feels like there is always time to stop and smell the roses. Nelson is a ravishing violist, and she is joined on the disc by multitalented John McLaughlin Williams, who conducts Northwest Sinfonia and accompanies Nelson on viola duos for piano, harpsichord and violin. This disc is a real find. (End optional trim) The Irish violist Garth Knox, formerly a member of the Arditti Quartet, is an adventurous soloist and composer in his own right. Although he has long been associated with hard-core European Modernism, he has branched out into early music playing the Baroque viola d'amore, which has sympathetic vibrating strings, as well as more folk-based new music. He put out a stunning solo CD last year that was all over the map. He has followed that with 'Viola Spaces,' on Mode, for which he composed all the music. In a series of eight etudes, he explores ways of producing sound on the viola, using as many as four instruments. He then follows with a series of variations on the music of Marin Marais, a Baroque French composer. In addition, he offers an entertaining viola-and-tuba duet and a lovely fantasy for viola d'amore and five violas based on Johannes Ockegham's 15th-century music. The hipster in the bunch is Nadia Serota, who plays solo viola music by fashionable young New York composers on 'First Things First.' The disc is on New Amsterdam Records. At least I think they are fashionable young New Yorkers. There are no program notes, which are considered passe in downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn new music clubs. The drink menu is thought the place for description and intellectual rigor. Nico Muhly is the featured composer on Serota's program, and there are additional works by Judd Greenstein and Marcos Balter. All the music is facile, the products of composers in love with a few good ideas worked into the ground. But there is a good time to be had, what with these cocksure composers and Serota, who is an engagingly bouncy violist, obviously in no mood to let a little lamentation wreck the party. 