Sonatina

Martinu’s Clarinet Sonatina is so spontaneously immediate in effect that one could imagine it took scarcely longer to compose than it took to write it down. Bearing in mind everything else the composer had to do in the few months he spent in America before his definitive return to Europe in 1955 - including work on the opera Greek Passion and the Incantations Piano Concerto - the reality might not be so very far from the conjecture. Although it conforms as a whole to a conventional three-movement sonatina shape, its bar-by-bar progress seems to be a matter more of instinct than of long-term strategy.

True, the first movement is a clearly defined ternary construction: the opening Moderato yields to an at first playful then lyrical middle section and is recalled in full before a briefly brilliant Allegro coda. What is not so clear is how it all grows as fluently as it does from the material presented in the opening bars, the euphonious piano introduction and the theme cheerfully derived from it by the clarinet on its first entry. The Andante is a strange interlude of chromatic legato lines drawn in even rhythms on the piano as a background to an expressive clarinet soliloquy. A well disguised allusion to the first movement, initiated by the piano and taken up by the clarinet, leads without a break into the closing Poco allegro, which is an impetuous display of mutual exuberance sweeping up more backward allusions towards the end.