The genesis of William Walton's Sonata for Violin and Piano is one of the most unusual and bittersweet in music history. Beginning in the mid-1930s, Walton enjoyed the close romantic companionship of Alice Wimborne, a prominent music patroness. On their way to a vacation in Capri in 1947, Lady Wimborne became ill (it turned out to be cancer) and required immediate treatment. By chance, Walton met the wife of violinist Yehudi Menuhin on a train, who offered to pay for the emergency treatment. As a gesture of gratitude, Walton offered to compose a work for violin and piano to be performed by Yehudi Menuhin and the husband of his wife's sister, the pianist Louis Kentner. The story gets even more intriguing from there: by the time the work was finished the following year, Lady Wimborne had passed away and Walton had married. Thus, it is not without reason that Walton's biographers hear in this work a strange and poignant mixture of romantic lyricism, elegiac sorrow, and optimistic contentment.

The work, which lasts just under 30 minutes, is cast in two movements of approximately equal length. The first movement, marked Allegro tranquillo, is embodied by a sixteenth-note gruppetto that intones the tonal center of B flat by plaintively emphasizing the leading tone A and dramatic leaps. This initially takes place in the violin against a placid chordal background provided by the piano, stretching into a languorous melody. Though lyrically transparent, the line cuts a harmonically rich path and engenders a series of whole-tone sequences, so that by the time the melody is given over to the piano it takes on a new and more complex character. A subsequent theme area utilizes more abrupt and conflicted rhythms, often outlined by Walton's characteristic habit of over- or under-shooting octave spans by leaping to ninths and sevenths. This more turbulent material nonetheless arrives at a firm harmonic repose, and subsequent structural points within the sonata form are articulated by recollections of the moving melody from the beginning of the movement.

The second movement comprises an Andante theme and seven variations, whose balance and expressive variety create the impression of a work of much broader scope. The theme itself carries some of the lyricism of the first movement, but is cast in a much more harmonically ambiguous light. Again, its contours alternately hover around close intervals and leap across large spans; the emphases on half steps occurs on a large scale as well, as the melody is immediately repeated a semitone higher. The subsequent variations become increasingly playful (from No. 2's "Quasi Improvisando" to No. 6's "Scherzando") until the "Andante tranquillo" of Variation No. 7. This contemplative recollection, however, is overtaken by the lively coda ("Molto vivace-Presto") with which Walton concludes the work.

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