There is too much to say in antic­i­pa­tion of the pro­gram of roman­tic violin/piano sonatas com­ing up Fri­day, April 15. For now it will have to suf­fice to point out that the per­form­ers are two of the real musi­cal stars of the Pacific North­west. Vio­lin­ist Maria Lar­i­onoff has just announced her retire­ment as Con­cert­mas­ter of the Seat­tle Sym­phony Orches­tra, with which she has reg­u­larly soloed in a remark­able range of reper­tory from Spohr to Khacha­turian. Robin McCabe cut back her con­cert career some time ago to accept the chal­lenges of serv­ing as Dean the School of Music at the Uni­ver­sity of Wash­ing­ton from which she recently retired to the ben­e­fit of audi­ences who will now more fre­quently enjoy her excit­ing and uncom­monly intel­li­gent pianism. By the way, both have been con­certo soloists with the Yakima Sym­phony Orchestra.

But we do not cel­e­brate vir­tu­os­ity so much this sea­sons as reper­tory, and the thread that uni­fies our clas­si­cal pro­gram­ming is roman­ti­cism. The April 15 pro­gram is so on the mark that the thread becomes a vir­tual tapestry.

As fre­quently as Schu­mann and Brahms are paired as the core of main­stream Ger­man Roman­ti­cism, they were remark­able dif­fer­ent per­sons. Schumann’s men­tal insta­bil­ity, which led finally to his dying in a men­tal asy­lum, con­trasts with Brahms’s rigid self-discipline and ret­i­cence to reveal him­self emo­tion­ally. In his first vio­lin sonata, Brahms uti­lizes the tools of nineteenth-century Roman­ti­cism but with a restraint that encour­ages us to encounter the beauty of his craft before we dig into his musi­cal soul. He wrote this sonata in the wake of the death of his god­son, Felix Schu­mann, Robert and Clara’s last born, but the sad­ness is muted as he bor­rows frag­ments of melody from two of his songs that deal poet­i­cally with rain as rem­i­nis­cent of child­hood and tears.

Schu­mann shows no such restraint. He grabs us by the heart in the very first sec­onds of his A Minor Sonata with an agi­tated melody in the dark low­est reg­is­ter of the vio­lin. From then on we are in a rest­less world of shift­ing tonal­i­ties, frag­ments of melodic ideas, wist­ful­ness and pain. The finale is prac­ti­cally a per­pet­ual motion machine, but we are more aware in Schu­mann of his demons than of the demonic vir­tu­os­ity he demands.

As a musi­cal form the sonata was a bequest from the clas­si­cal mas­ters to the Roman­tics of the nine­teenth cen­tury. Thus we may expect a pro­gram on this series to draw on the clas­si­cal prece­dents as illus­tra­tion, but the bril­liance of Maria and Robin’s pro­gram is to close with a twentieth-century ver­sion of the sonata in clas­si­cal garb, Prokofiev’s Sonata in D Major.

Orig­i­nally for flute and piano, Prokofiev’s rewrit­ing for vio­lin (at the request of David Ois­trakh) makes me won­der how this could pos­si­bly be more suit­able for the wood­wind voice. No mat­ter; it is a won­der­fully witty, melodic mod­ern take on a clas­si­cal model by the mas­ter of the genre. It even restores the form to its clas­si­cal four-movement scheme. By clos­ing with this “neo-classical” sonata we hear a faith­ful ref­er­ence to the sonatas of Haydn and Mozart in musi­cal voice of a com­poser who also has digested the lan­guage of Roman­ti­cism. We can hear every ges­ture with the same clar­ity we enjoy from Mozart; har­monic com­pli­ca­tions never intrude on the tunes. The four move­ments are eco­nom­i­cal and for­mally cor­rect. But this is Prokofiev with his sar­donic humor, taste for the mar­tial, and abil­ity to build to a thrilling cli­max even in small forms.

Brooke Creswell

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