Sergei Prokofiev’s career in Russia was well established by the age of 26, thanks to his early concertos and a standout first symphony, but then the October Revolution upended Russian society in 1917. Like most artists with the means to do so, Prokofiev went into exile, but he struggled in his attempts to restart his career, first in the United States and then in France.

Taking a break from Paris, Prokofiev was vacationing on the French Riviera in 1932 when he began work on a score commissioned by a new chamber music society. He landed on the scoring of two violins after hearing a piece for that combination that he considered unsuccessful; as he put it in his autobiography, “Listening to bad music sometimes inspires good ideas.”

The Sonata for Two Violins comes from the period when Prokofiev was finding his way toward a style he called “new simplicity,” which was increasingly at odds with the strident modernism favored in Europe. It was also a time when he was renewing contact with the Soviet Union and finding it to be a more receptive and appreciative environment. Prokofiev actually sent the sonata to the violinists of the Beethoven Quartet, and they gave a performance in Moscow that came a few weeks before the scheduled premiere in Paris by two violinists of international stature, Samuel Dushkin and Robert Soetens.

The sonata is constructed in four short movements organized slow-fast-slow-fast, a structure that harks back to the seminal violin sonatas by Arcangelo Corelli. After the austerity of the first movement, the fat chords and restless figurations of the fast second movement land with extra excitement. Mutes give the slow third movement a hushed quality, and if the themes have something of the romance of Romeo and Juliet, it might be because Prokofiev was capturing ideas for that later ballet in the same notebook where he drafted the sonata. The finale explores an extraordinary range of textures in its five brief minutes, including a haunting melody in the extreme high range near the end that leads into an accelerated finish with the two violins entangled and overlapping.

Aaron Grad ©2025

In 1936, nearly 20 years after fleeing Russia in the throes of revolution, Sergei Prokofiev became the only major artist to resettle in the Soviet Union, where he was hailed as a hero. During World War II, he returned to themes he had drafted in 1939 for a trilogy of piano sonatas, and the middle one that he completed in 1942, the Piano Sonata No. 7, turned out to be one of his biggest successes. Not only did it win a Stalin Prize, conferring the official approval of the state, but it even caught on in America and England, at a time when the shared aim of vanquishing Nazi Germany outweighed US-Soviet tensions.

Prokofiev’s Seventh Sonata won over domestic critics without resorting to the patriotic, populist hyperbole of “Soviet Realism” that Stalin espoused. The opening movement, cast in a “fast and restless” tempo, takes Prokofiev’s signature style of wry, marching music to a spiky and pungent extreme. Intervening sections in a muted Andantino tempo supply a somber counterbalance.

Prokofiev’s biographer Daniel Jaffé sleuthed out that the sonata’s slow movement opens with a paraphrase of a Robert Schumann song, Wehmuth, which starts, “Sometimes I can sing as if I were happy, but secretly tears well up and free my heart.” Prokofiev clearly understood how dangerous of a world he had entered when a close friend in the theater world was abducted (and, it turned out, secretly executed) and his wife was murdered in their apartment; in such a repressive environment, hidden references like this Schumann touchstone speak volumes.

The finale, marked with the colorful tempo of Precipitato (“rushed”) and compressed into lopsided measures of 7/8, closes the sonata with a surge of manic, unrelenting propulsion. With so much energy bristling within this taut, compressed sonata, it makes sense that The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra would commission the composer and pianist Stephen Prutsman to arrange it for chamber orchestra, a follow-up to his previous expansion of Prokofiev’s First Violin Sonata.

Aaron Grad ©2025

While in the musical hotspot of Mannheim in 1777 on a job-hunting expedition, the 21-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart secured a commission to compose concertos and quartets for Ferdinand Dejean, an amateur flutist who worked for the Dutch East India Trading Company. Mozart managed to complete two quartets for flute and strings, but he came up short on the request for three concertos. Besides the fresh Flute Concerto No. 1 , he manufactured a second by transposing an oboe concerto he had written recently. This Flute Concerto No. 2 in D Major was only known in the amended version until the twentieth century, when parts for the original oboe version turned up in Mozart’s hometown of Salzburg.

The concerto’s first movement comes with the unusual tempo marking of Allegro aperto, indicating an open, spacious flow to the fast tempo. Comparing the flute and oboe versions of this music, there are subtle details that point to Mozart’s sharp grasp of instrumental color and idiomatic technique, like a moment at the end of its first solo statement when the flute makes huge leaps up and down within a pattern of flowing sixteenth-notes. The oboe version voices the upper notes an octave lower, which made sense for that less agile instrument, but a flute playing the exact same part would have sounded rather dull and easily covered by the orchestra.

In the slow movement, it was a brilliant and unexpected choice to accompany long stretches of the flute’s tender melody with only violins. The rondo finale brings its own surprises with a main theme built out of six-measure chunks instead of the more balanced four or eight. Mozart clearly thought highly of this tune that had already appeared in two of his compositions, since he wrote an aria that begins almost identically for the opera The Abduction from the Seraglio four years later.

Aaron Grad ©2025

Pablo de Sarasate showed such precocious talent as a violinist that the queen of his native Spain helped arrange for the 12-year-old to go abroad to study at the Paris Conservatory. He soon embarked on a career playing around the world, including concertos written for him by many of the finest living composers, but he was most renowned for his recitals, which included his many original compositions for violin and piano.

Sarasate is best known today for the showpiece he wrote for himself based on “Gypsy Airs,” or Zigeunerweisen in German. “Gypsy” music was all the rage at the time, even if outsiders glossed over the fact that they were actually celebrating Hungarian folk music from the Magyar people who had been there for millennia, with no relation to the culturally distinct Romani people (the preferred term for “Gypsy”) who maintained their own traditions hundreds of years after they migrated into central Europe. And a lot of times the supposed folk music wasn’t even old or anonymous; the third section of Sarasate’s score borrowed a popular Hungarian song that had been written just a few years earlier, and the fiendish fourth section lifted a theme in the style of a csárdás from a Hungarian Rhapsody by Franz Liszt (who at least was a Hungarian himself).

A large part of the lasting appeal of Zigeunerweisen is the highly specific and virtuosic use of advanced violin technique, which makes this transcription for flute by Jasmine Choi all the more stunning. Along with quick leaps to approximate double-stops and overblown notes imitating artificial harmonics, the most imaginative adjustment must be the passage meant to be played on the violin’s G-string, below the range of the flute, which Choi handles by singing and playing at the same time.

Aaron Grad ©2025