Es ist... (Sonata No. 3)

The first edition of the score of "Es ist..." (Sonata No. 3) for violin and piano Op.109, 1998. The violin part is provided. All additional performing materials are available from Meladina Music: meladina@mail.comThe Sonata was completed on 21st of June 1998 in St Albans, but its idea came to me a few years earlier, when my family and I lived at the campus of the Keele University in Staffordshire. That time I tried to develop the idea of so-called "complete chords" (combined of all different unrepeated intervals). With the series of such chords I made my own harmonisation of the choral "Es ist genug", the final movement of Cantata BWV 60 "O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort" by J. S. Bach's. Later returning to that idea I expanded it into 17 minutes long three-movement sonata for violin and piano. Some themes of it are based on the musical spelling of the name of J. S. Bach. The piece is dedicated to the memory of my father-in-law, the eminent physicist-theorist Oleg Borisovich Firsov, who was born on the 13th of June 1915 in Saint Petersburg and died on the 2nd of April 1998 in Moscow. The work was played for the first time by Patricia Kopachinskaia (violin) and Ivan Sokolov (piano) on 20th of August 2002 at the recording session in the studio No. 1 of the Moscow Radio. The recording was included into the CD album "An Introduction to Dmitri Smirnov", Megadisc Classics, MDC7818, Belgium. Dmitri N. Smirnov