Violin Sonata No.1 (1963)

Some Russian composers were more impressed than others by the avant-garde scores and ideas that filtered into the Soviet Union from Western Europe during the Khrushev “thaw” in the late 1950s and early 1960s. To judge by the Violin Sonata that he wrote for Mark Lubotsky in 1963, Alfred Schnittke was more enthusiastic about them than most. He jumped ahead of his role model, Dmitri Shostakovich, in adopting a form of serial technique – Shostakovich’s Violin Sonata, which also opens with a twelve-note theme, was written five years later – and his treatment of the piano in this work (including direction contact with the strings under the lid) touches on extremes that his older contemporary would never even contemplate.

Although it is a defiantly modernistic work, Schnittke’s Violin Sonata No.1 is neither atonal (it is loosely in C) nor serially organised. It opens with a twelve-note theme on unaccompanied violin – recalling Berg in its melodiousness and its tonal implications – but not even the short Andante is rigorously dodecaphonic. Not that the twelve-note theme is forgotten: it is dramatically recalled, in double stops on violin over violent chord clusters on the piano, towards the end of the movement and is distantly echoed, in reverse this time and in a low left-hand rumble, in the closing bars.

The Allegretto contains more twelve-note material, including the disjointed dance tune introduced by violin, the following jazzy episode, and a lyrical melody marked semplice which, after four hefty dissonances, appears in all innocence on piano to a pizzicato accompaniment on violin. Again the scoring for piano is violently percussive in places, not least in the long crescendo leading to a climactic recall of the semplice melody in augmentation on violin in canon with the same theme in its original note values on piano.

The Largo, which follows the Allegretto without a break, might well be a tribute to Shostakovich in that it is a passacaglia comparable to the slow movement of the older composer’s Piano Trio Op.67. It is more clearly a tribute to J.S. Bach, however, since the passacaglia theme introduced in alternating ff and pp chords by the piano is the BACH motif transposed up a tone. However that may be, the violin part is an expressively liberated and wide ranging improvisation ending in extreme attenuation in a perilously sustained passage of false harmonics.

Beginning as an uninhibited jazz scherzo of extraordinary virtuosity, the last movement gradually incorporates material from earlier movements – the passacaglia theme multi-stopped on violin, the semplice melody treated at length and with some derision, the opening twelve-note theme inconspicuously on violin, the passacaglia theme again in strident bell-like chords on the piano.