Violin Sonata by Rudi Martinus van Dijk

Lento - Allegro molto

Molto Allegro

Theme and variations

Presto

 

RUDI VAN DIJK”S VIOLIN AND PIANO SONATA PLAYED AT PCM FESTIVAL JUNE, 2013

 

Musicologist Richard Wigmore writes in the program notes for the Peasmarsh Chamber Music Festival that Rudi Martinus van Dijk was “Eclectic in his musical influences…”  He continues that Maestro van Dijk “…once cited Berg, Ravel, Stravinsky and Rachmaninov as the composers he most loved. As the American musicologist Bernard Jacobson has written, Van Dijk’s relatively small output of chamber and orchestral music blends ‘an emotional intensity at times evocative of the world of Austro-German expressionism with a fascinating subtlety and indirectness of utterance suggestive rather of French influences’. He wrote his Violin Sonata in 1994-5 for Anthony Marwood, a long-time admirer of his music. Marwood has also performed Van Dijk’s Sextet (with the Raphael Ensemble), while in 2001 he and his fellow-members of the Florestan Trio, Susan Tomes and Richard Lester, gave the premiere of his Piano Trio at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw.

 

The Violin Sonata is in four movements with, as originally written, a theme and variations – by far the longest movement – in second place. After Marwood and the pianist Kyoko Hashimoto gave the premiere in Bristol in 1995, Van Dijk decided to reverse the order of the two middle movements. The first movement frames a volatile Allegro molto, full of rapid, edgy repartee between the two instruments, with two stretches of largely unaccompanied recitative for the violin. Here, as in the whole sonata, Van Dijk gives prominence to the interval of a semitone. In the composer’s revised ordering, the second movement is a quick fire scherzo in dancing 9/8 metre, half-playful, half-fractious.

 

The heart of the sonata is the third movement, five variations on a slow, semitone-saturated theme shared between piano and violin,playing in harmonics. In the first variation, Molto allegro in 5/8 time, violin and piano chase each other in canon. The second returns to the tempo of the theme, beginning serenely, with the piano playingunacorda (ie with the soft pedal), before the violin becomes hyperactive with trills and strange sulponticello (playing on the bridge) and sultasto (on the fingerboard) effects. The third variation opens in gruff, laconic dialogue, with the theme distorted and fragmented between the instruments, and ends with a beautiful lyrical canon. After the ethereal fourth variation, where the muted violin produces flautando (ie, flute-like) tones by bowing lightly over the end of the fingerboard, the scherzo-like final variation deconstructs and dismembers the theme in comic-grotesque banter. Its spirit spills over into the brief finale, with its capriciously changing violin sonorities (including harmonics, pizzicato and flautando), tiny, helter-skelter canons, and snatches of aching lyricism.