About This Offer

Four Portraits for Violin was commissioned by the great violinist, Rachel Barton Pine, in 2016. Rachel was envisioning a piece which would be a modernized comment on Bach’s Partita #2 in D minor, for solo violin. The way that I found to make this vision work for me was to compose a piece with a loose reference - in two of the four movements (the Gigue and the Pavane) - to the European dance forms of Bach’s time. The Gigue for instance, while having the triple meter of 12/8 in common with the gigue of the 17th century, departs from that sensibility with the aggressive and jagged syncopations and meter changes, which modernize it. The Pavane, on the other hand, remains in a stately 4/4 meter, but harmonically departs from the baroque era with the use of bitonality and more modern harmonic progressions in the melodic lines. The other two movements (Prelude and Allegro, and Adagio Lirico) are not composed with a dance form in mind at all, but rather as independent movements that aim to simply express and illustrate the mood of each title. I wrote the Prelude and Allegro as sort of an announcement, an overture. The Adagio Lirico is a melancholy contemplation of remorse.

Each movement’s tonal center is in a minor key (like Bach’s Partita) and corresponds to an open string on the violin. Movement 1 (Prelude and Allegro) is in A minor, Movement 2 (Adagio Lirico) is in E minor, Movement 3 (Pavane) is in D minor, and Movement 4 (Gigue) is in G minor.

I want to thank Rachel Barton Pine for commissioning this work; it was truly an honor composing this work for such an amazing virtuoso. I also want to thank Dale Breidenthal, violinist for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, for her invaluable help and advice, while I was composing this piece.

Four Portraits for Solo Violin in PDF format.  

The license includes:

• 2 printed copies (please contact us if you need more)
• Submission of all performance dates and locations prior to the performance
• Sharing of digital files is not allowed