"People of the older school regard me as a revolutionary, while the rising generation look on me as an old fogey, so one pleases nobody but oneself," John Ireland once reflected. The Violin Sonata No. 1 in D minor, indeed, is an innovative work within a late Romantic framework, but it is not revolutionary in spirit. It is an early work by this English composer, less well known than his Violin Sonata No. 2 of 1917. Completed in 1909, the Violin Sonata No. 1 had as its impetus a prize competition established by W.W. Cobbett of encyclopedia fame. Ireland's sonata took first prize over 133 other entries, and the work was published in 1911. But it had to wait two more years for its first performance; Ireland at the time was little known. The composer thought enough of the work to revise it twice, once in 1917 and once in 1944.

The most striking characteristic of the Violin Sonata No. 1 is its extreme variability of mood, with emotional shifts spilling freely over the boundaries of what are otherwise straightforward structures. The first movement is in a clearly delineated sonata form, with opening material in the tonic D minor and a shift to the relative major during the exposition. Yet everywhere the music is subject to subtle and unexpected shadings. Ireland makes use not only of Grieg's characteristic shifts from major to minor, which suffused English concert life at the time, but of a variety of other harmonic twists and turns that show the composer's awareness of Debussy without taking on an Impressionist atmosphere. The movement ends with a coda that is as unsettled as what has gone before. The second movement, labeled a Romance, opens tunefully but veers in a chordal central section to a harmonically remote region that suggests Ireland's long interest in the supernatural. The sonata's finale, at six minutes just over half the length of the other two movements, is a cheerful and straightforward rondo, close to the Brahmsian chamber music Ireland wrote as a young man in its tendency to develop contrasting episodes out of the opening material. There is a quality of youthful experimentation about the sonata as a whole, but it is a rich piece of late Romantic chamber music, unfairly forgotten by those who saw the music of the early twentieth century as an inexorable march toward serialism.

© James Manheim, Rovi