The sonata was composed at a time that I felt very influenced by my conversations with Tomasz Liebig, wonderful concertmaster for the Brucknerorchester in Linz, Austria. Since I was hired as a principal guest conductor during the years 2003-2014, we had ample opportunities to discuss, share, argue, and agree on many themes related to the violin technique, expressivity, and impact.

When I first started studying at a conservatory, I was told that because of my grades on the entrance test, I was assigned to study both violin and piano. Since I was probably influenced by the sound of a piano located at a place where we lived with my family (somebody played the piano in the adjacent room), they said that I quit violin within my first year. That was felt deplorable by the principal violin teacher, who was then famous for preparing very good musicians.

Years later, I came back to the stringed instruments instruction: I started studying viola at age 15, soon going back to violin. My deep love for the violin sound and its eloquent expression has been present all my life.

The main technical premise in the building of the piece was the study of Demetrius Constantine’s Dounis (1893-1954), a famous Greek pedagogue, and gifted player of violin, viola and mandolin. He wrote a groundbreaking series of books, mostly directed to the independence of fingers, the importance of shifting, as well as the development of flexibility.  Most of the fugue is built upon the extension of arpeggios, requiring special fingerings.

The main musical basis of the fugue is the conceptual premise of a direct relationship between subject and counter subject: they are both constructed within the same sequence of intervals. Thus, the countersubject is actually a succession of longer notes that mirror an augmented version of the subject.

The sonata form is also influenced by the aforementioned unicity, as the two themes are also intrinsically related to each other, thus the development is perceived as a series of variations similar to a short chaconne. The tonal centricity of G is perceived, the harmonic language is consequential to a chromatic extended tonality.