Mozart’s virtuosity on the piano is amply attested. Less well known is that he was also a child prodigy on the violin, the instrument on which his father built his reputation. (The author of a famous textbook on violin playing, Leopold Mozart was a violinist in the orchestra of Prince-Archbishop Colloredo of Salzburg.) By age 13, Wolfgang was playing alongside Leopold in the court orchestra; three years later he was promoted to concertmaster. As a young man, he often performed on the violin in public. But despite his brash self-confidence—in one of his cockier moments he boasted that he was equal to “the finest fiddler in all Europe”—Mozart never felt as comfortable playing the violin and viola as he did the piano. In later years, he apparently gave up practicing altogether and took out his violin only in the privacy of domestic chamber music sessions.
Mozart’s G-Major Sonata was a product of his travels between September 1777 and January 1779, which included extended visits to Mannheim and Paris. He and his father were chafing under the restrictions of musical life at the ecclesiastical court in Salzburg, and Wolfgang had been dispatched in search of greener pastures under the watchful eye of his mother. After she died unexpectedly in Paris in the summer of 1778, he made his way back to Salzburg by slow stages and took up a new post as court organist. His predilection for operas, concertos, and other secular works increasingly set him at odds with Prince-Archbishop Colloredo, and in 1781, he moved to Vienna to pursue a freelance career.
The bravura character of the G-Major Sonata is apparent from the opening bars. The violin starts things off with a languid, long-breathed melody whose octave leap and prolonged trill hint at the more strenuous pleasures that lie in store. With its sophisticated repartee, jaunty syncopations, and dramatic crescendos, the Allegro con spirito seems light years away from the uncomplicated geniality of Mozart’s early violin sonatas. Dispensing with a slow movement, he moves straight into an equally vivacious Allegro in rounded song form (A-B-A), centering around a somewhat ominous interlude in G minor.
Despite rapidly deteriorating health and recurring bouts of depression, Schubert produced one masterpiece after another in the last year or so of his all-too-short life. In addition to the two piano trios that cemented his reputation as Beethoven’s peer in the field of chamber music, these late works include the brooding song cycle Winterreise, the effervescent concert aria “Der Hirt auf dem Felsen,” the last three piano sonatas, the great String Quintet in C Major, and the brilliantly virtuosic Fantasy in C Major.
Composed in December 1827, the Fantasy was intended first of all for Schubert’s wide circle of friends, who gathered in private homes and public houses throughout Vienna for fellowship and music making. At these intimate Schubertiads, the composer was assured of a sympathetic reception for his work. Public performances were another matter. When violinist Josef Slavík and pianist Carl Maria von Bocklet premiered the C-Major Fantasy in early 1828, one newspaper tartly commented that the piece “occupied rather too much of the time a Viennese is prepared to devote to pleasures of the mind.”
The Fantasy is indeed of substantial, almost sonata-like proportions, and its corresponding wealth of themes showcases Schubert’s unflagging melodic genius. The centerpiece is a set of mesmerizing variations on a song he had written several years earlier; the majestic tune in A-flat major catches the listener by surprise after the playful antics of the preceding Allegretto in A minor. That, in turn, is preceded by a magical introduction in which the violin’s soaring melody is enmeshed in a web of shimmering tremolos in the piano. As is often the case in Schubert’s music, the flickering interplay of lyricism and drama is enhanced by the juxtaposition of major and minor keys.
One of the greatest pianists of her time, Clara Schumann (née Wieck) didn’t come into her own as a composer until nearly a century after her death. The child prodigy made her debut in the Leipzig Gewandhaus at age 11, playing one of her own compositions, and went from one triumph to another during the 1830s. After her marriage to Robert Schumann in 1840, she led the stressful double life that was the common lot of gifted women in the 19th century. Equally devoted to her family and her music, she managed to rear eight children (all but four of whom would die before her) even as her brilliant but increasingly erratic husband succumbed to mental illness. Robert encouraged her creative work on the tacit understanding that his career took precedence over hers, but Clara virtually stopped composing after he died in 1856.
The spring of 1853 saw an uptick in Clara’s compositional activity. In June, she wrote a set of variations based on one of Robert’s piano pieces and presented it to him as a birthday offering. The Three Romances for Piano, a set of six songs, and the Three Romances for Violin and Piano completed the season’s output. (Robert was also on a compositional roll that summer—his last, as it turned out, before he began his long descent into severe mental illness.) Dedicated to the great Hungarian violinist Joseph Joachim, with whom Clara often performed, the Op. 22 Romances are a charming, if lightweight, sequel to her powerful Piano Trio of 1846. In their fanciful spontaneity of expression, they bear a marked family resemblance to Robert’s own “character pieces,” such as the Romances for Oboe and Piano, Op. 94.
The first Romance, in the warm key of D-flat major, is characterized by a leisurely, rocking rhythm in the piano, which provides supple support for the violin’s soaring, decorously ornate melody. In the Allegretto, the violin’s theme—embellished with grace notes and trills—flits capriciously between G minor and G major; it echoes the first of Robert’s Op. 94 Romances in its playfully arching contours. The long-breathed lyricism of the third Romance is accentuated by the softly rippling arpeggios in the piano part. As a contemporary reviewer remarked: “All three pieces display an individual character conceived in a truly sincere manner and written in a delicate, fragrant hand; although the violin melodies are simple, they are handled very effectively with interesting harmonies and accompaniments as well as with contrasting melodies, all without exaggeration.”
Aftab Darvishi has a passion for composing music that transcends boundaries and encompasses a range of mediums and contexts, including concert music, film music, theater music, and more. For the last few years, she has focused on the fusion of diverse musical cultures and experimented with various combinations of vocals, which have been a constant source of inspiration throughout her musical journey.
Darvishi was born in Tehran, Iran. She graduated with honors in music performance from the University of Tehran in 2010, and in 2012, she earned a master’s degree in composing for film from the Conservatorium Van Amsterdam under the guidance of Jurre Haanstra; she also studied Karnatic music with Rafael Reina. In 2015, Darvishi studied composition with Martijn Padding and Yannis Kyriakides at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in composition at the University of Birmingham.
Darvishi’s music has been presented at festivals in Europe, the US, and Asia, where she’s worked with Kronos Quartet, HERMESensemble, Orkest De Ereprijs, Ricciotti ensemble, Oerknal ensemble, Ragazze Quartet, Phion Orchestra, Cappella Amsterdam, BBC Singers, and DoelenEnsemble.
Since graduating, she regularly has been invited to guest lecture at the University of Tehran. In 2016, she was awarded the Tenso Young Composers Award for her piece “And the world stopped lacking you …” for a cappella choir. In 2019, her opera Turan Dokht in collaboration with Miranda Lakerveld premiered at Holland Festival 2019. In 2022, her debut album, A Thousand Butterflies, was released on 30M Records. A portrait album that looks back on her 11-year journey as a composer, A Thousand Butterflies evokes a life that has crossed continents. It spans a range of styles and includes work for a variety of instrumental forces as well as electronics.
Likoo is one of the most important mughams from the Baluchistan province of Iran, a region located in the southeast of the country, bordering Pakistan and Afghanistan. Traditionally, Likoo is performed with instruments such as the gheychak (a bowed lute) or donali (a pair of fipple flutes), often accompanied by a singer. These songs typically are about grief and longing for a loved one. This piece reflects a deep longing, specifically for those lost since the onset of the Women, Life, Freedom movement in Iran in September 2022. During this time, many mothers have lost their children, lovers have been torn apart, and many have fled their homeland. While loss may take on different meanings for each person, I explore its various dimensions in this piece. While the direct presence of Likoo might not be evident in this piece, its essence and aesthetics serve as the inspiration for the composition.
This piece is dedicated to one of the greatest musical figures of our time—Anne-Sophie Mutter, who commissioned the work—and to all the women who continue to mourn the loss of a loved one.
—Aftab Darvishi
Born in Bologna in 1879, Respighi studied the violin as a child and for a time earned his living as an orchestra musician. In his mid-20s, he discovered early music and began transcribing it for modern instruments, a sideline that proved highly successful throughout his career. Meanwhile, he evoked the past in his own voice in works such as the Ancient Airs and Dances and Concerto gregoriano for violin and orchestra. Respighi is best known for his vividly atmospheric symphonic poems inspired by the fountains, pines, and festivals of Rome, but he also wrote numerous operas and ballets, as well as chamber music and songs.
Respighi composed the B-Minor Sonata for Violin and Piano in 1917, four years after moving to Rome to teach at the future Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia. It followed hard on the heels of Fountains of Rome, his breakthrough work; although indifferently received at its premiere, the first of his “Roman” orchestral tone poems was an instant hit when Arturo Toscanini conducted it a few months later. Jascha Heifetz and other virtuosos performed a similar service in popularizing the B-Minor Sonata, which harks back to a small cluster of violin-piano works that Respighi composed as a young man.
Written in a ripe late-Romantic idiom, the Sonata in B Minor is the work of an intellectually curious musician steeped in a wide range of early and modern music, from Richard Strauss and Debussy to Brahms and Puccini. The opening Moderato—with its soaring, rhythmically supple cantilena theme, dark and stormy middle section, and radiant coda—is reminiscent of César Franck’s Violin Sonata in A Major. Respighi’s harmonic language is highly chromatic but essentially tonal: The Andante espressivo, an elegiac meditation in B major, is built around a gently rocking arpeggio figure that is almost purely diatonic. The urgent theme from the first movement returns in the finale, a vigorous passacaglia with Bachian overtones that is equally rich in counterpoint and lyricism.
—Harry Haskell