BLAKE POULIOT, VIOLIN

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756 - 1791)VIOLIN SONATA IN F MAJOR, K. 376Mozart wrote over three dozen violin sonatas, sixteen of them during his precocious childhood and youth. The Sonata in F Major, K 376 was composed in 1781 and so is one of his “mature sonatas”. 1781 was a significant year for Mozart. It began in January with the successful premiere of his opera, Idomeneo, in Munich. In June he finally broke free of the stifling relationship with his employer, Archbishop Collorado, and began life as a freelance musician. By the end of the year, he was acknowledged to be the finest keyboard player in Vienna and was gaining stature as a composer. He also moved in as a lodger with the Weber family and, having been rejected as a suitor by the eldest daughter, Aloysia, began a courtship with the youngest daughter, Constanze. They were married the following April. The Sonata in F Major was one of a set of six sonatas written over the summer and published in December of 1781. They were advertised as being for the piano with accompaniment for violin. In fact, the thematic material is well integrated between the piano and the keyboard and the two instruments are equally balanced, which was a bit of a novelty at the time.

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LEOŠ JANÁČEK (1854 - 1928)DUMKA POUR VIOLON ET PIANOAt the age of twenty, Leoš Janáček enrolled in the Prague Organ School. He was so impoverished as a student that he could not afford a piano in his room, so he studied and practised on a keyboard drawn on his tabletop. It was a long time before his dedication and persistence were rewarded. Recognition as a composer did not come until the Prague success of his opera Jenufa in 1916; he was sixty-two. Prior to that, he taught music at the Brno Organ School for over forty years. And while his best known works were written after his fiftieth birthday, Janáček had been actively composing almost all of his adult life. He gathered and studied the folk music of his native Moravia, and he deeply admired Russian culture and music. These two passions found their way into his compositions, including the “Dumka for Violin and Piano.” It is thought to date from 1880, and was first performed in 1885 in a benefit concert for the Brno Organ School, though it was not published until 1929, shortly after the composer’s death. The Czech term ‘dumka’ originally meant a lament, from the Ukrainian ‘duma’, a kind of ballad generally melancholic or thoughtful in character.

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LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770 - 1827)ROMANCE NO. 2 IN F MAJOR, OP. 50The French “Romance” often marked the slow movement of a violin concerto, and some music historians have speculated that Beethoven may have written his two Romances for violin and orchestra as potential slow movements for an unfinished concerto. In the end he published them as separate pieces. In German, Romanze designates a song-like instrumental piece. Beethoven’s sweetly “singing” Romance (it is marked adagio cantabile) clearly shows his familiarity with the French style. Composed in 1798, the F major Romance is especially famous for its high range and sweet melodic line, which may partly account for its being played more often than its sibling, “Romance No. 1 in G.” Whether the listener hears the melancholy of lost love, or merely contemplative poetic musing, there is no denying the Romance’s emotional resonance or stately beauty.

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FRITZ KREISLER (1875 - 1962)CAPRICE VIENNOIS FOR VIOLIN AND PIANO, OP. 2Born in Vienna, Friedrich Kreisler was a child prodigy. He studied under Anton Bruckner at the Vienna Conservatory, and with Leo Delibes and Jules Massenet in Paris. He won the “Grand Prix de Rome” gold medal at the age of twelve and toured America as a thirteen-year-old. Aside from two stints in the army, Kreisler performed on stage and recordings until 1950, a career that spanned over sixty years. While regarded as one of the greatest violinists of all time, his name has also survived as a composer. Some of his compositions were in the style of earlier composers such as Couperin and Vivaldi, and he initially passed them off in performance as rediscovered works of these earlier composers. After settling in the United States just prior to World War II, Kreisler wrote music for films and for Broadway shows as well as for concert and broadcast performances. Written in 1910, the same year in which he premiered Elgar’s Violin Concerto, Caprice Viennois for Violin and Piano embodies in name what almost every one of his other compositions aims toward in spirit: a certain turn-of-the-century Viennese gaiety and grace, as passed through the prism of his own good-natured but complex character.

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SERGEI PROKOFIEV (1891 - 1953)VIOLIN SONATA NO. 1 IN F MINOR, OP. 80Sergei Prokofiev is one of the towering figures of twentieth- century music. Of composers of the last one hundred years, only Richard Strauss is performed more frequently in America than he is. Tremendously prolific, Prokofiev created major works across an astonishing range of genres. Peter and the Wolf is a standard of children’s music. He completed seven operas, seven symphonies, eight ballets, five piano concertos, four concertos for various

string instruments, a film score, nine piano sonatas plus a large amount of other chamber music. The Violin Sonata No. 1 won the Stalin Prize for Prokofiev in 1947. It is one of the darkest and most brooding of Prokofiev’s works. The opening movement is dark and somber, ending with slithering violin scales which Prokofiev described as “wind passing through a graveyard.” The second movement is brusque and heavily accentuated, though not devoid of melody. The reflective Andante is filled with longing and tenderness, while the final movement is full of aggressive energy alternating with more tranquil passages before returning to the “wind in the graveyard” motif which leads to the close. The first and third movements of this sonata were played at Prokofiev’s funeral.

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MAURICE RAVEL (1875 - 1937)TZIGANE, RHAPSODIE DE CONCERT, FOR VIOLIN AND PIANO, M. 76It was in 1922 that Ravel first met the Hungarian-born violinist Jelly d’Arányi, who was the niece of the great 19th-century violinist Joseph Joachim and the recent dedicatee of two violin sonatas by Béla Bartók. At a private musicale where d’Arányi performed Ravel’s Sonata for Violin and Cello with cellist Hans Kindler, the composer asked the violinist to play some Gypsy melodies. As pianist Gaby Casadesus, who was present, later recalled, this ‟continued until about 5 a.m., with everyone exhausted except the violinist and the composer.” This is how the idea for Tzigane was born, although Ravel did not actually write the piece until two years later, just in time for the London premiere, played—of course—by Miss d’Arányi.The Gypsy flavor can be felt in every measure of this brilliant concert rhapsody. The violin part is fiendishly difficult and the Gypsy melodies are garnished with spicy harmonies, emphasizing the wildness of an exotic musical culture that endlessly fascinated the composer.It is not universally known that Tzigane exists in three versions: in addition to the two familiar ones (violin with piano and violin with orchestra), there is a version for violin and luthéal, which was, in the words of Ravel biographer Arbie Orenstein, ‟a short-lived attachment to the keyboard with produces the approximate timbre of a Hungarian cimbalom or a harpsichord.”

© Peter Laki, Ph. D.