Sonata for 2 violins Op.56

“Sometimes hearing bad compositions gives birth to good ideas,” Prokofiev remarked. “One begins to think: that’s how it should be done, what’s needed is this or that.” It was hearing a bad piece of the same kind that inspired Prokofiev’s Sonata for 2 violins. Written in the summer of 1932 in a farmhouse overlooking the Mediterranean at St Tropez, it is a melodious, texturally fluent composition prophetic of the simplicity which Prokofiev was beginning to develop at the time. The opening Andante cantabile is a particularly attractive example: two themes are presented, briefly developed, and twice combined. It is not, however, a tame work, as the percussive main theme, the hard pressed development section and the brilliant coda of the second movement so clearly demonstrate. The Commodo on the other hand is exclusively lyrical. The last movement, a witty rondo, neatly combines both elements and, not long before the end, finds time to incorporate a memory of the opening theme of the Sonata.

“Sometimes hearing bad compositions gives birth to good ideas,” Prokofiev remarked. “One begins to think: that’s how it should be done, what’s needed is this or that.” It was hearing a bad piece of the same kind - fortunately perhaps, he didn’t identify it - that inspired Prokofiev’s Sonata for 2 violins. For him the basic necessity of a work like this is that it must present the two instruments in a contrapuntal relationship and on equal terms. Written in the summer of 1932 in a farmhouse overlooking the Mediterranean at St Tropez, the Sonata is a melodious, texturally fluent composition prophetic of the simplicity which Prokofiev was beginning to work towards at the time. The opening Andante cantabile is a particularly attractive example: two themes - the first of them not unlike the clarinet melody at the beginning of the Third Piano Concerto - are presented, briefly developed, and twice combined. It is not, however, a tame work, as the percussive main theme, the hard pressed development section and the brilliant coda of the second movement so clearly demonstrate. The Commodo on the other hand - a ternary structure on two related themes - is exclusively lyrical. The last movement, a witty rondo, neatly combines both elements and, not long before the end, finds time to incorporate a memory of the opening theme of the Sonata.