Classical Music | Violin Music

Recorded on 10/03/2006, uploaded on 01/17/2009

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

Sonata No.2 in D Major, Op.94 bis             Sergei Prokofiev

Moderato; Scherzo: Presto; Andante;  Allegro con Brio

This wonderful work started its life as a sonata for flute and piano.  When Prokofiev began composing it in 1942, it made a cheerful and welcome respite from feverish hours spent on his opera based on War and Peace.  Commissioned by the Committee on Artistic Affairs, Prokofiev said the new Sonata was intended "to sound in bright and transparent Classical tones," presumably the same tones that inhabited his very accessible and popular "Classical" Symphony, also in D Major, and his first Violin Concerto.

The Sonata's themes are simple and engaging, its rhythms uncomplicated, its emotions direct and resolutely optimistic.  Only in the final Rondo does the aggressive tone of Prokofiev's other wartime works raise its martial head.

As soon as the D Major Sonata had been played for the first time-by flutist Nicolai Kharkovsky and pianist Sviatoslav Richter on December 7, 1943 in Moscow-violinists recognized its possibilities for their instrument, and David Oistrakh, the Russian violinist and conductor, suggested to the composer that it would "enjoy a more full-blooded life on the stage" if arranged for violin and piano.  Prokofiev made such a version without delay, and Oistrakh, as well as nearly every other leading violinist in the world, programmed it frequently.

The Hungarian virtuoso Joseph Szigeti played its American premiere in Boston in 1944 from a manuscript smuggled out of the Soviet Union.

- Commentary by Clair W. Van Ausdall

Courtesy of International Music Foundation.