Recent guests on Live from WFMT, violinist Paul Huang and pianist Helen Huang (no relation) present their second album as a duo. Following the critical praise for Kaleidoscope, the duo’s 2023 release featuring sumptuous Romantic Era works by Respighi and Saint-Saëns, Mirrors centers two violin sonatas composed during the Second World War.

Paul Huang explains that both the Prokofiev Violin Sonata No. 1 and the Poulenc Sonata act like program music: “[Poulenc] wrote his Sonata as a response to fascism and dedicated it to the memory of the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, who was shot by fascists during the Spanish Civil War… Prokofiev did not specifically call his Sonata a response to War, but from his description of the muted whispering scale at the end of the first and last movements as like ‘wind passing through a graveyard,’ it is not difficult to see where this work is coming from.”

Between these two emotional pieces, the duo has programmed Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel (1978) to offer a moment of introspection and reflection.