This is a masterly and highly expressive work in a style that draws its forms and procedures from both neo-Classical and modernist examples, and its emotional content from Romanticism.

Rochberg, born in 1918 in Paterson, NJ, was one of the first serialist composers to reject atonality and the twelve-tone system and return to tonality. After initial interest in Hindemith and Bartók, he studied at the the American Academy in Rome studied with Luigi Dallapiccola, Italy's leading serialist. Rochberg wrote notable and often quite excellent music during his decade as one of America's leading twelve-tone composers.

But in 1964 his 20-year-old son, Paul, died. Father and son had disagreed over Paul's conversion to an Eastern religion and Rochberg sought some sort of reconciliation by writing settings of Paul's poetry (eventually including Paul's "Songs in Praise of Krishna"). Rochberg found that his efforts to do so within the twelve-tone system was unsatisfying. "Over-intense" in its "constant palette of chromaticism," as he put it, twelve-tone music now appeared to him "finished, hollow, meaningless."

His new compositional interest was in writing music with deeply expressive content, which some came to call "New Romanticism." This sonata is an example of such music.

The opening Allegro moderato begins with a slower introductory paragraph then, to a driving rhythmic line in the piano's low and mid-range the movement proper begins. The texture of the music often resembles Baroque sonatas in its use of lithe, striding bass lines and other lines in linear textures, but the harmonies can be modern in their use of chromaticism and other techniques within the structure of tonality, and the music is tense, driven, and bothered with a feeling of intense restlessness. The movement rarely settles into a calm or relaxed mood. At over nine minutes, this movement represents fully half of the 18-minute sonata.

Even quarter-note pulses in the piano and a dotted bass figure, plus the modal structure of the viola melody over it distantly allude to the texture of the "blues" movement of Maurice Ravel's Violin Sonata. But while the Ravel is "cool" and insouciant, this movement is darker in mood, at least in its first subject. However, the contrasting theme, starting with the piano in a high register above pizzicato viola, is French in its elegance, and uses Debussyian harmonies, though with a yearning Romanticism that would astound the anti-Romantic Debussy.

The final movement is marked "Finale: Epilogue." This is a brief movement at a bit over two and a half minutes. It seems to sum up the emotional mood and the main motives of the longer movements.

Rochberg wrote the work in honor of the 75th birthday of the great American violist William Primrose, who requested that its premiere be given to violist Joseph de Pasquale and pianist Vladimir Sokoloff, who introduced it at the Seventh International Viola Congress in Provo, UT. It has earned a place as one of the leading American works for the instrument.

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