Corigliano composed the Violin Sonata for his father, who would not so much as look at the score. The concertmaster for 23 years of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, Corigliano's father had discouraged his son's efforts at composition at every turn: "Performers don't want to bother with your work and audiences don't want to hear it. So what are you doing it for?" Corigliano persisted, however, and worked at radio stations to support himself while composing.

In 1964, Corigliano had his first success as a composer with the Sonata for Violin and Piano, written in 1963. The piece won first prize in the 1964 Spoleto Festival Competition for Creative Arts (on the panel were Walter Piston and Samuel Barber) and received its premiere there on July 10, 1964. Not long after that, Roman Totenberg gave the first performance in the United States. Once performers across the globe had deemed the Violin Sonata worthwhile, Corigliano's father elected to perform the piece, giving it in a concert in New York City in 1966.

Basically tonal and romantic in conception, the Violin Sonata features polytonal moments and makes use of other twentieth-century rhythmic and metric techniques. Overall, the piece is conservative and melodic in style and leans toward contemporary works by Copland, Walton, and Bernstein.

Sonata form provides the structural basis for the first movement, marked Allegro. In C major, the first theme features large leaps, while the secondary theme is built on jazzy rhythms within a 5/8 meter. The second movement also has two themes, but each of these forms a primary section and the second features a particularly diabolical sounding diminished fifth. There is no development, and the two sections of the movement act as contrasting entities within an overall key of D major. Marked Recitative, the third movement provides a break from the intensely lyrical music heard thus far and moves the harmonic foundation to G major. Back in D major, the fourth movement takes rondo form as its point of departure. As in the later Piano Concerto (1968), the episodes between appearances of the main theme feature references to the previous movements, a process that halts for a moment in the slow middle section. The movement closes on a strident minor second.

Corigliano's mixture of traditional forms (although fashioned to fit his needs) and more recent harmonic and melodic styles in the Violin Sonata augurs much to come in the development of his compositional style.



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