The three Sonatas for violin solo by Mieczyslaw Weinberg fall into a long line of compositions that follow the example of Bach's unaccompanied sonatas and partitas, and annotator Wolfgang Sandner points to a more specific connection: in Weinberg's opera The Passenger, a violinist in a concentration camp, told to play a Viennese waltz, responds instead with the Chaconne from the Bach Partita No. 2 in D minor, BWV 1004 (and is executed). Unlike the sets of most other composers, Weinberg's were written over a number of years, ...
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The three Sonatas for violin solo by Mieczyslaw Weinberg fall into a long line of compositions that follow the example of Bach's unaccompanied sonatas and partitas, and annotator Wolfgang Sandner points to a more specific connection: in Weinberg's opera The Passenger, a violinist in a concentration camp, told to play a Viennese waltz, responds instead with the Chaconne from the Bach Partita No. 2 in D minor, BWV 1004 (and is executed). Unlike the sets of most other composers, Weinberg's were written over a number of years, as if the composer kept coming back to the problem of facing Bach's towering examples. He certainly picks up on the virtuoso aspect of Bach's works, which exist close to human limits; Listen to the Intervals movement of the Sonata No. 2 for solo violin, Op. 95, for a taste of the long strings of double stops he incorporates. That sonata is made up of short movements on a single technical idea, while the Sonata No. 1, Op. 82, is made up of sonata forms with punishing technical...
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