program note
My Sonata No. 2 for Piano written in Tel Aviv, Israel, belongs to an early body of compositions I created in my teens. I performed it numerous times in Israel and the U.S. in the decade that followed and was fortunate to have had it published by the Israeli Music Institute (IMI), but of course I consider it to be a “youthful work” of mine. Around 2015 I was approached by Israeli pianist Hagai Yodan who, it turned out, had learned the work and was planning to record it. For a radio broadcast of his performance I was asked to provide a program note, which was something of a challenge given the many decades that elapsed since I composed the work. Nonetheless it was a delight to know that the music exists not just on the printed page, but as a “sound organism” with its own life, independent of me.
The Sonata’s three movements follow fairly traditional, classical Sonata-form structures. Its first movement begins with a brief introduction that returns and is developed at several points in the movement, leading to an assertive first theme and a contrasting second. The second movement is slow and contemplative, while the rhythmic and cheerful Rondo-shaped last moment has echoes of jazz music. The work as a whole also reflects the influence of composers such as Liszt in the character of the B minor Sonata opening and especially in the manner in which the opening is integrated into the development of the first movement, and of Gershwin, whose music I found exhilarating at that stage of my life, in the last movement. Nonetheless it was not my intent, in this or in any other work of mine, to deliberately model other composers as a means of honing my craft. It was always my desire to create a meaningful, expressive essence that would be personal and coherent in its detail as well as in its architectural design.
The three movements of the Sonata are:
Moderato
Lento
Rondo-Vivo
—Shulamit Ran