Duration: 14’
Instrumentation: solo violin
Performance Note:
The origins of this Sonata go back to early 2002 when I heard Hilary Hahn perform the Shostakovich Violin Concerto No. 1 in Chicago while on tour a with the Concertgebouw Orchestra and, if memory serves, Riccardo Chailly. I came away resolved to write a sonata for violin and piano and quickly settled on themes for the outer parts of what I expected would be a three-movement effort.
When I sat down to write, though, I couldn’t figure out what to do with the keyboard. So, worried I hadn’t thought the piece through well enough yet, I set it aside for a few months and moved on to other things. Months became years and, as happens, any urgency that had once existed drained from the project.
By the summer of 2023, it was far from my mind until, one night that summer, my then-7-year-old son woke me, early in the night, from a deep slumber because of a bad dream he’d had. As any parent can relate, he was easily pacified and soon dozed off again. But I was left staring at the ceiling in the wee hours. In an effort to help myself get back to sleep, I inexplicably decided that thinking about music I needed to write would be restful (which, in lucid moments, is rarely the case) and, suddenly, the specter of my long-postponed sonata loomed. Lamenting that, after two decades, I still didn’t know what to do with the piano, I found myself thinking “it’s really a shame there has to be a piano at all”…and a metaphorical light went on.
What followed was rapid composition—the outer movements were put down complete in less than a week—and then months of revisions and small tweaks. The central sections offer nods to Leonard Bernstein (“Pizzicato serenata” is a play on the title of his charming song “Piccola serenata”) and current events.
While considering a proper slow movement, the 7 October 2023 terrorist attacks transpired in Israel. In the aftermath, I thought an instrumental adaptation of the Kaddish prayer would be apt. As it happened, setting the whole proved unnecessary: sufficient thematic material presented itself over the first third or so of the text. The larger movement can be heard as a too-small lament for man’s intractable capacities for hate, death, violence, and destruction.
I hope that throughout his life that my son, Benjamin, will somehow be able to rise above the worst of those impulses. He gets the dedication, both for his invaluable contribution to this project—and for being a great kid.