Breath of Time

In recent years, I’ve realized how deeply inspired I am to write music by the very people I write it for.

I’ve always found the story of the Franck Violin Sonata as incredibly moving and romantic as the music itself: Franck wrote the sonata for Ysaÿe and his wife as a wedding present, and they premiered it at the wedding, sight reading through the score. It is one of my favorite pieces of all time, and the love and intention with which it was written resonates so deeply through the music.

As I was finishing my Clarinet Concerto for the Albany Symphony in April, I was also planning a trip to Paris in June for the wedding of one of my closest friends, Suzana Bartal. As the two women in our year of the Yale DMA program, we supported each other unconditionally through some of the toughest moments of our lives, celebrated our accomplishments with each other, and developed a deep and lasting friendship. As I wrote my last commission of the season, I saw that the slow movement of my Clarinet Concerto could actually be turned into a piano trio as a wedding gift to Suzana and her husband Eric. Suzana is a world-class concert pianist, and one of her chamber music specialties is playing piano trios.

Our story ended up a little differently from César Franck’s: as I was at Suzana and Eric’s wedding, this trio, in an amazing coincidence, was actually being premiered in Los Angeles on the same day. Even though it was performed a world away, it made me so happy that it was premiered by and for some of my dearest friends.

A beautiful addendum to this story: two years later, Suzana played this trio for the first time in the United States at a concert at the Wallis Annenberg Performing Arts Center, in Beverly Hills, CA, with cellist Peter Myers and violinist Vijay Gupta. And the next day Vijay and I got married. I love that this one piece has played a central role in both of our weddings.

Elgar wrote his three most important chamber works–the Violin Sonata, the String Quartet and the Piano Quintet–late in his career, after retreating to a small cottage in the countryside with his wife Alice, to recover from an illness.  His close friend, violinist W. H. “Billy” Reed, visited him there, and together they played through the new sonata Sir Edward had been working on.

In his early sixties, Elgar was a celebrated elder statesman in English music, but a younger generation, seeking new directions, had already appeared on the scene with Ralph Vaughan Williams and Gustav Holst.  There is something autumnal or valedictory about Elgar’s later works:  one has the feeling that the composer is looking back on the past rather than ahead into the future.  As the critic of the London Times wrote after the first performance, given by Reed and pianist Landon Ronald: “Elgar’s sonata contains much that we have heard before in other forms, but as we do not at all want him to change and be somebody else, that is as it should be.”  The composer himself voiced a similar sentiment in a letter to his old friend Marie Joshua, to whom he intended to dedicate the sonata: “I fear it does not carry us any further but it is full of golden sounds and I like it, but you must not expect anything violently chromatic or cubist.”  When Joshua passed away just days after she received this letter, Elgar altered the ending of the sonata to repeat a lyrical melody from the slow movement in his friend’s memory.

The three-movement sonata is filled with lush Romantic melodies and makes high technical demands on both players.  Its emotional center is the middle movement, subtitled “Romance,” which progresses from a brooding opening to a passionate climax, before reaching a new state of calm at the end.  The energetic finale gains extra emotional depth from the slow episode just before the grandiose conclusion.

© 2026 Peter Laki

Did the 31-year-old Schubert know in the summer of 1828 that his time was running out?  With his health seriously compromised, he composed at a feverish speed, producing the last three piano sonatas, the monumental Mass in E-flat, and the fourteen songs later published as Schwanengesang (“Swan Song”) all during this period.

The Quintet in C, perhaps the crowning achievement of Schubert’s last year, is a composition like no other.  The vastness of its concept, the extraordinary rhythmic drive and lyrical intensity place this work in a class all by itself.  By adding a second cello to the string quartet (and not a second viola as Mozart and Beethoven had done), Schubert gave extra weight to the bass register, increasing the resonance and creating an almost orchestral sound in the most powerful passages.

At the opening, the music gathers its momentum only gradually, rising by almost imperceptible degrees from the somewhat hesitant first measures to the great explosion that soon follows.  The second theme, with its unspeakably sweet parallel thirds, is another wonder, as are the successive waves of rising and subsiding tension in the central portion of the movement.

And what is one to say about the serenely floating opening melody of the slow movement, with its pizzicato (plucked) accompaniment, a single and seemingly endless melodic line that projects a beguiling image of peace and harmony (though not without a tinge of sadness)?  A great surprise awaits, however, in the form of a passionately dramatic middle section, whose key, rather unusually, is a half-step above the movement’s initial key (F minor as opposed to E major).  When the opening melody returns, the first violin adds some exquisite melodic filigree that enhances the excruciating beauty of the melody even more.

The third movement is a greatly expanded scherzo with some vigorous dance motifs and highly innovative harmonies.  As before, contrast is maximized in the middle section, an almost independent slow movement that strikes a tragic tone in a distant key (once more emphasizing the half-step above the main key, D-flat against C).

Contrast and ambiguity remain the defining characteristics in the finale.  It is ostensibly a cheerful rondo, yet it begins in the dark key of C minor which keeps intruding throughout the movement.  At the end of a spirited coda, just when one would think that all the tensions have finally been resolved, the dramatic juxtaposition of D-flat against C returns to conclude the quintet in a truly startling manner.

© 2026 Peter Laki