Frankel Sonata

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 928, 24 May 1957, Page 31

Frankel Sonata

BENJAMIN FRANKEL, whose solo Violin Sonata is to be played by Francis Rosner (2YC, Wednesday, May 29, 8.0 p.m.), is a considerable force in English contemporary@music, and many of our young composers have studied under him in London. His solo violin sonata provides us with what appears to be the first comprehensive statement of his musical personality. The opening lines offer us a theme in D with an equivocal third, a dichotomy which grows and invades the material with typical "side-slipping" passages. The feeling of indecision suggested by such methods is balanced by the formal sureness of the music-many of Frankel’s first movements aim at suggesting indecision in order, no doubt, to initiate the listener into the rhetoric and conclusion of succeeding movements. Scale passages, uneven, or distantly related, together with ironic distortions of more expressive themes, appear in the second movement, a fierce, outspoken and even harsh scherzo, stylistically linked to a

certain ironic trait notable in the last movement of Frankel’s Clarinet Trio. A good deal of the third movement springs from the opening two bars, in which are implied the chords of A minor and G,, both figured in a somewhat modal way. The inevitable progress of this movement is remarkable; and the effect of the whole work is at once provocative yet conclusive.