Violin Sonata in A Minor

Apart from early works that he suppressed, Vaughan Williams’ chamber-music output was small. So it was a surprise when, in his eighties, he produced this violin sonata—his only one, and troubled in its general mood, although with strong ideas and an abiding energy that doesn’t sound like music by an old man. The composer was himself a violinist in his youth. He had a special genius for string sound, as his deathless Lark Ascending testifies. And there’s a reference to that music in this much later sonata, which premiered (in a 1954 studio broadcast that aired on Vaughan Williams’ 82nd birthday) at the hands of Frederick Grinke, a British virtuoso noted as a champion of Lark. The three movements start with a “Fantasia” that’s actually more structured than the word "fantasy" implies; it has a main theme suggestive of the robust world of English folk song but on solemn terms that come to a bleak ending. The second-movement “Scherzo” is unsettlingly nervous. But the emotional weight of the piece comes in the more substantial third: a set of variations on a theme unearthed from a discarded piano quintet written half a century before.