Sonata, for violin and piano, op. 134

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Last edited by Bryan Tyson
May 16, 2019 | History

Sonata, for violin and piano, op. 134

Shostakovich's Violin Sonata is one of the very finest productions of his late career, a chamber work of unbending grandeur and seriousness and on a huge and muscular scale. Written in the autumn of 1968 for the occasion of the 60th birthday of the composer's friend the great violin virtuoso David Oistrakh, and in the wake of the Second Violin Concerto he had written for the same artist in the previous year, the sonata embodies Shostakovich's love for Oistrakh's phenomenal artistry, for the sweetness and tragic intensity of Oistrakh's singing tone and for his tremendous abilities to make the music pound and throb with dance-rhythms. At the time when he composed this sonata, the composer was becoming fascinated with the idea of the 12-note row. Although he was never a serial composer, he was lured by the harmonic and motivic discipline that 12-note music suggested and this sonata abounds in 12-note ideas which give the music a dark, sinewy and ascetic feel. The other great influence on this music is Bach. So the substantial first movement continually suggests the world of Bach's great fugues from the '48' and the St Matthew Passion. It also rings with the strange chiming of funeral bells. The second and central movement, by contrast, takes us into a quite different enthusiasm of Shostakovich's: 'klezmer' or Jewish wedding music. This allegretto suggests a terrifying dance in which aggression and intense sympathy are held in a dangerously unstable balance until the movement hammers towards a tragic climax. The long finale, a mighty set of variations in the form of a passacaglia, again returns us to the world of Bach, with much fugal part-writing, echoes of the haunting cadences of chorales and clear hints that Shostakovich had in mind as a model the most famous of all Bach's works for violin, the mighty Chaconne from his 3rd solo Partita. In the very closing bars Shostakovich brings us back once more to the funeral bells from the first movement. - Gerard McBurney at boosey.com.

Publish Date
Language
Russian

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Edition Availability
Cover of: Sonata, for violin and piano, op. 134
Sonata, for violin and piano, op. 134
2017, Izdatelʹstvo "DSCH", DSCH Publishers
Paperback in Russian
Cover of: Sonata, for violin and piano, op. 134
Sonata, for violin and piano, op. 134
1969, Boosey & Hawkes
in English

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Book Details


Edition Notes

Published in
Moscow
Other Titles
Sonata dli︠a︡ skripki i fortepiano, soch. 134
Copyright Date
2017

The Physical Object

Format
Paperback
Pagination
1 score (66 p.) + 1 part (24 p.)
Dimensions
29 x x centimeters

ID Numbers

Open Library
OL26894171M
ISBN 13
9790706427218

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May 16, 2019 Edited by Bryan Tyson Added new cover
May 16, 2019 Edited by Bryan Tyson Edited without comment.
May 16, 2019 Edited by Bryan Tyson Edited without comment.
January 19, 2010 Edited by WorkBot add subjects and covers
December 11, 2009 Created by WorkBot add works page