Emotion

Emotion is a big, broad word and seemingly all music is emotional in some way or another. However, when it comes to these two works, the overwhelming, unifying theme connecting them was simply raw emotion. Respighi, that most over-the-top composer of some of the world’s most bombastic pieces, poured all his passion into this sonata for violin and piano. It’s a complex, and almost orchestral-sounding sonata that’s easy to forget there are only two players at work. Nearly a decade before Respighi composed his sonata, Mendelssohn turned his attention again to the string quartet, composing a set of three — the Opus 44’s. In his first quartet, Op. 13, he eulogized the recently departed Beethoven, and with this quartet he appears to have done so again, as it not only corresponds exactly to Beethoven’s own E minor quartet composed in 1806 but also takes on a similar mood.