Program notes by Eric Bromberger

Sonata No. 4 in C Minor for Violin and Piano,BWV 1017
JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH
Born March 21, 1685, Eisenach, Germany
Died July 28, 1750, Leipzig

When Bach moved from Weimar to Cöthen in 1717, his musical duties changed completely. For the Duke of Saxe-Weimar, Bach had been primarily a church musician, writing cantatas and his great works for organ, but the Cöthen court was strictly Calvinist and would allow no music more elaborate than hymn-singing as part of its services. Prince Leopold of Cöthen, however, proved an enlightened patron. He was an enthusiastic amateur musician (he played violin, clavier, and viola da gamba), and he put a seventeen-piece professional orchestra at Bach’s disposal. From this period came the bulk of his secular instrumental music: the Brandenburg Concertos, the first book of The Well-Tempered Clavier, several of the orchestral suites, the violin concertos, and the magnificent works for unaccompanied violin and unaccompanied cello.

During these years Bach also composed six sonatas for violin and keyboard. Bach was a great synthesizer, and he drew upon several traditions in these sonatas, combining the contrapuntal complexity of German music with the singing line of the Italian instrumental sonata.

The most striking movement of the Sonata in C Minor is its opening Siciliano, marked Largo. A siciliano (that title indicates its place of origin) is a slow dance in 6/8 built on swaying dotted rhythms, and it makes for a serious opening to this sonata. The brisk Allegro is in three parts, though the final part varies the opening section rather than repeating it literally. The Adagio features the violin’s singing line over the keyboard accompaniment, but the interesting thing here is the clash of rhythms: the violin’s melodic line rides along dotted rhythms, while the piano has steady triplets. Bach releases these tensions only in the closing measures, where the two instruments interlock gracefully on quiet strands of sixteenths. Though the spirited finale, an Allegro in binary form, has something of the feel of a perpetual motion, it is largely fugal in construction.

Sonata No. 1 in D Minor for Violin and Piano, Opus 75
CAMILLE SAINT-SAËNS
Born October 9, 1835, Paris
Died December 16, 1921, Algiers, Algeria

Saint-Saëns wrote his First Violin Sonata in 1885, at the height of his powers. Although Saint-Saëns did not play the violin, he clearly understood the instrument–already he had written three violin concertos and the famous Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso; the Havanaise would follow two years later.

The structure of the sonata is unusual. It has four movements, but the first and second are connected, as are the third and fourth, dividing the sonata into two extended parts. Saint-Saëns’ marking for the opening movement–Allegro agitato–is important, for this truly is agitated music. Beneath its quiet surface, the movement feels constantly restless. Its opening theme, a rocking tune for violin, alternates meters, slipping between 6/8 and 9/8; perhaps some of the music’s air of restlessness comes from its failure to settle into a constant meter. The lyric second idea–a long, falling melody for violin–brings some relief, and the dramatic development treats both these themes. While the second movement is marked Adagio, it shares the restless mood of the first. The piano has the quiet main theme, but the music seems to be in continuous motion before coming to a quiet close.

The agreeable Allegretto moderato is the sonata’s scherzo. It dances gracefully, skittering easily between G major and G minor. At the center section, the violin has a haunting chorale tune over quietly-cascading piano arpeggios; as the movement comes to its close, Saint-Saëns skillfully twines together the chorale and the dancing opening theme and presents them simultaneously. Out of this calm, the concluding Allegro molto suddenly explodes–the violin takes off on the flurry of sixteenth-notes that will propel the finale on its dynamic way. This is by far the most extroverted of the movements, and it holds a number of surprises: a declamatory second theme high in the violin’s register and later a brief reminiscence of the lyric second theme of the opening movement. At the end, Saint-Saëns brings back the rush of sixteenth-notes, and the sonata races to a close so brilliant that one almost expects to see sparks flying through the hall.

Sonata No. 1 in A Minor for Violin and Piano, Opus 105
ROBERT SCHUMANN
Born June 8, 1810, Zwickau, Germany
Died July 29, 1856, Endenich, Germany

Schumann’s relation with the violin was never wholly comfortable. A pianist himself, Schumann found the prospect of writing for stringed instruments intimidating, and he appears to have been threatened most of all by the violin–he wrote a number of pieces of chamber music for viola and for cello before he was finally willing to face writing for the violin. Then that music came in a rush–during the final years of his brief creative career Schumann wrote three violin sonatas, a violin concerto, and a fantasy for violin and orchestra.

The Violin Sonata in A Minor was the first of these. Schumann composed it very quickly–between September 12 and 16, 1851. Schumann’s first engagement with the violin produced a compact sonata in classical forms.

The sonata is in three movements that offer Schumann’s customary mixture of German and Italian performance markings. The opening Mit leidenschaftlichem Ausdruck (“With passionate expression”) bursts to life with the violin’s forceful, surging main idea over the piano’s shimmer of constant sixteenths. This busy motion is punctuated by great swooping flourishes that lead to gentle secondary material; it is the opening theme, however, that dominates the development, and Schumann rounds off the movement with a lengthy coda that drives to a dramatic close.

Relief arrives in the central Allegretto, which treats the violin’s innocent opening melody in rondo form. Tempos fluctuate throughout, with the music pulsing ahead, then reining back; some of these episodes become animated before the movement winks out on two pizzicato strokes.

Marked Lebhaft (“Lively”), the finale returns to the tonality and mood of the opening movement. The violin’s steady rush of sixteenths makes this feel at first like a perpetual-motion movement, but it is in fact another sonata-form movement, complete with a jaunty little secondary tune and an exposition repeat. This movement shows subtle points of contact with the first movement that run beyond their joint key of A minor and impassioned mood: the rhythm of the sonata’s opening theme underlies much of the finale, and near the close that theme actually makes a fleeting appearance. But the finale’s forceful main subject quickly shoulders this aside and drives the sonata to an almost superheated close.

Sonata in G Major for Violin and Piano
MAURICE RAVEL
Born March 7, 1875, Ciboure, France
Died December 28, 1937, Paris

Ravel began making sketches for his Violin Sonata in 1923, the year after he completed his orchestration of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. He was composing a number of works for violin during these years, including Tzigane, but the Violin Sonata proved extremely difficult for him, and he did not complete it until 1927. The first performance, by violinist Georges Enesco and the composer, took place on May 30, 1927, in Paris while that city was still in a dither over the landing of Charles Lindbergh the week before.

In the Violin Sonata, Ravel wrestled with a problem that has plagued all who compose violin sonatas–the clash between the resonant, sustained sound of the violin and the percussive sound of the piano–and he chose to accentuate these differences: “It was this independence I was aiming at when I wrote a Sonata for violin and piano, two incompatible instruments whose incompatibility is emphasized here, without any attempt being made to reconcile their contrasted characters.” The most distinctive feature of the sonata, however, is Ravel’s use of jazz elements in the slow movement.

The opening Allegretto is marked by emotional restraint. The piano alone announces the cool first theme, which is quickly picked up by the violin. A sharply rhythmic figure, much like a drum tattoo, contrasts with the rocking, flowing character of the rest of this movement, which closes on a quietly soaring restatement of the main theme.

Ravel called the second movement Blues, but he insisted that this is jazz as seen by a Frenchman. In a lecture during his American tour of 1928, he said of this movement: “while I adopted this popular form of your music, I venture to say that nevertheless it is French music, Ravel’s music, that I have written.” He sets out to make violin and piano sound like a saxophone and guitar, specifying that the steady accompanying chords must be played strictly in time so that the melodic line can sound “bluesy” in contrast. The “twang” of this movement is accentuated by Ravel’s setting the violin in G major and the piano in A-flat major at the opening.

Thematic fragments at the very beginning of the finale slowly accelerate to become a virtuoso perpetual motion. Ravel brings back themes from the first two movements before the music rushes to its brilliant close, which features complex string-crossings for the violinist.