Penderecki's dynamic and lyrical "Sonata for Violin and Piano" was composed in 1953 when the composer was only 20 years old and attending the Middle School of Music. Approximately 8 minutes in duration, it is structured in traditional sonata-allegro form, and is a remarkably well-written work even though it is not yet in what were to be the composer's mature styles. Penderecki was a skilled violinist at his young age and his understanding of the instrument is apparent in the fluid writing of this Sonata. In the first movement Allegro, the energetic, sometimes tense, sometimes jolly, Prokofiev-like theme skips and leaps with poignant dissonances from the outset. A second more lyrical and Romantic theme enters soon afterward but lasts only a brief time before the music plunges back into the on-rush of the first subject. A few measures quote the secondary theme briefly, and the movement blasts toward its climax with brilliant double stops and powerful chords. The second movement is an Andante that opens with a plaintively stated, elegiac theme in bare octaves that cycles several times as the violin line emerges from it. The violin plays quasi-improvisational figures and mellismatic variations on the theme. The piano repeats the theme in a high register as a single line which accelerates to a new brisk tempo, as the music seques directly into the third movement's Allegro vivace speed. The foot-tapping third movement has the spirit and harmonic content of a Bartókian folk dance. This is a balanced and enjoyable work, and certain portions of it, especially the lyrical themes of the first and second movements give some hint of his Penderecki's later so-called Romantic period between 1975 - 85.



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