Sonata for cello unaccompanied
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David Cowley, cello
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The Sonata for Cello Unaccompanied, Op. 34, No. 2 was written in the fall of 1970 for David Cowley and was first performed by him on October 22 at Emporia State University. The four-movement work reflects not only the composer's lifetime devotion to J.S. Bach, but his immediate preoccupation of those years, his first opera, Frankenstein, with novelist John Gardner. One can also hear something of the vast Kansas prairie in the quiet spaciousness of the third movement.
Requiring a cellist of professional stature, the unceasing lyricism of the Sonata is overcast with the kaleidoscopic, hallucinatory elements of Gardner's Frankenstein libretto. In 1974, the Sonata was given a prize from the California Cello Club and was performed by Phyllis Luckman on a concert at the University of California, Berkeley in 1976, with all the other winners. |
