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DvoÅ™ák called this music a sonatina rather than a sonata for several reasons. It is a little shorter than most full-scale sonatas, it is not terribly demanding technically, and it is without the complications of construction, harmony, and development that usually mark sonatas. Yet it is not really a “student” piece, for it has musical substance and demands a fairly accomplished player. The question of American influence on the music DvoÅ™ák wrote in this country has been debated endlessly. DvoÅ™ák himself said that the main theme of the Sonatina’s slow movement was inspired by a visit to the Minnehaha Falls in St. Paul, and some have heard the rhythmic snap and syncopation characteristic of American music throughout the Sonatina. But DvoÅ™ák remained quintessentially Czech throughout his years here, and it is far more useful to enjoy this music for itself than to search for “influences.”

The marking for the opening movement, Allegro risoluto (“Fast and resolute”), may seem a little stern, given the music’s melodic nature and easy flow. This sonata-form movement alternates lyric ideas and bursts of energy before its quiet close. Many listeners will discover that they already know the Larghetto, which was made popular in an arrangement by Fritz Kreisler under the name Indian Lament, a title DvoÅ™ák never imagined or heard. The energetic Scherzo rips along in its outer sections (DvoÅ™ák demands a great deal of string-crossing here), but offers a more lyric trio section. The lengthy finale, marked Allegro, is built on three theme groups. The first is full of rhythmic snap, while the third–in E major–has the rising-and-falling theme-shape of the opening movement of the New World Symphony. DvoÅ™ák treats all three themes before driving the Sonatina to its rousing coda.

The Sonata opens with a slow introduction (the only one in Beethoven’s ten violin sonatas), a cadenza-like entrance for the violin alone. The piano makes a similarly dramatic entrance, and gradually the two instruments outline the interval of a rising second (E to F-sharp). At the Presto, that interval collapses into a half-step, the movement jumps into A minor, and the music whips ahead. Beethoven provides a chorale-like second subject marked dolce, but this island of calm makes only the briefest of returns in the course of this furious movement. The burning energy of that Presto opening is never far off: the music rips along an almost machine-gun-like patter of eight-notes, and after a hyperactive development, the movement drives to its abrupt cadence.

Relief comes in the Andante con Variazioni. The piano introduces the melody, amiable but already fairly complex, the violin repeats it, and the two instruments briefly extend it. There follow four lengthy and highly elaborated variations, and while the gentle mood of the fundamental theme is never violated, these variations demand some complex and demanding playing. For all its complexities, this is a lovely movement, and Beethoven and Bridgetower had to repeat it at the premiere.

The final movement opens with a bang–a stark A-major chord–and off the music goes. Beethoven had composed this movement, a tarantella, a year earlier, intending that it should be the finale of his Violin Sonata in A Major, op. 30, no. 1. But he pulled it out and wrote a new finale for the earlier sonata, and that was a wise decision: this fiery finale would have overpowered that gentle sonata. Here, it dances with a furious energy that makes it a worthy counterpart to the first movement. At several points, Beethoven moves out of the driving 6/8 tarantella meter and offers brief interludes in 2/4. These stately, reserved moments bring the only relief in a movement that overflows with seething energy, a movement that here becomes the perfect conclusion to one of the most powerful pieces of chamber music ever written.

Beethoven was so taken with Bridgetower’s playing that he intended to dedicate the sonata to him, and it is a measure of the playful relations between the two that Beethoven inscribed the manuscript to the violinist: “Mulattic sonata written for the mulatto Brischdauer, a complete lunatic and mulattic composer.” And so we might know this music today as the “Bridgetower” Sonata but for the fact that the composer and the violinist quarreled, apparently over a remark that Bridgetower made about a woman Beethoven knew. The two eventually made up, but in the meantime Beethoven had dedicated the sonata to the French violinist Rodolphe Kreutzer, and so it is also known today as the “Kreutzer” Sonata. Ironically, Kreutzer did not like this music–Berlioz reported that “the celebrated violinist could never bring himself to play this outrageously incomprehensible composition.

White’s Blues Dialogues is a suite of four brief movements for unaccompanied violin, each in varying blues styles. Composing blues without the harmonic resources of the piano is a challenge, and that challenge is compounded when they are written for a linear instrument like the violin. White writes music of some brilliance here, as the violin becomes a blues instrument, sliding expressively between keys as it sings these varied movements. The music is easily followed: two moderately paced movements–Blues feeling and Expressive–give way to two more dynamic movements: Fast and funky and Moderately fast. The last of these shows the influence of Bartók, himself a strong believer in combining classical music with folk idioms.

Still arranged a number of spirituals, and one of the most popular of these is Here’s One, a moving, slow spiritual whose first lines are:

Talk about a child
who do love Jesus,
Here’s one,
here’s one.

Still made a number of versions of his setting of Here’s One, including arrangements for mixed chorus, mezzo and soprano, flute and piano, and others. The music is heard at this concert in Still’s arrangement for violin and piano.

When Rachel Barton Pine commissioned a piece from Billy Childs in 2018, he turned to an incident that had caused a national furor. In July 2016 a young African-American man named Philando Castile was shot and killed by a police officer during a traffic stop in a suburb of St. Paul, Minnesota. The officer was fired but later acquitted when charged with manslaughter; that acquittal provoked national outrage two years before the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

Childs composed Incident on Larpenteur Avenue as his response to the killing of Castile. The work is not so much a musical depiction of that incident as an emotional reaction to it, though there are moments of intense scene-painting here. In an interview, Childs said that he wanted the beginning, with its patterns of non-stop sixteenth-notes, to create an “unsettled feeling”; the violin has jagged outbursts in this section, but there is some beautifully lyric writing for the instrument here as well. The level of tension increases, and Incident on Larpenteur Avenue drives to its climax with the shooting of Castile: Childs depicts this with seven violent pizzicato strokes from the violin that echo the seven shots the officer fired. In the aftermath of this violence, the music continues with a slow section for piano that the composer says depicts “life slowly exiting Philando Castile’s body.” Now the work seems to exist on two different levels: the piano offers subdued and grieving music, while above it the violin reacts with angry outbursts. Incident on Larpenteur Avenue concludes as the violin recalls its lyric material from the very beginning.

Sargent Johnson (1887-1967) overcame a difficult childhood–he was sent to several orphanages, and he and his brothers were separated from their sisters when they were all very young. Johnson eventually made his home in San Francisco, where he worked as both sculptor and painter. He created a number of works titled Mother and Child, so the exact inspiration for this movement is uncertain. Still’s movement has invariably been compared to a lullaby, but this lullaby does not remain soothing and quickly grows to an animated passage full of double-stops before winding down to its quiet conclusion.

Augusta Savage (1892-1962) also had a difficult childhood, and like Barthé she was associated with the Harlem Renaissance. Her Gamin, of painted plaster, depicts the head and shoulders of a boy of about twelve. He wears a cap and loose clothing and seems to stare out at the viewer with a slightly defiant air. Still’s Gamin is a character study of the that boy, full of blues and sharply-syncopated rhythms. This movement– very short–has a particularly effective ending.