Sonata - OB/PN

Sonata
for oboe (or soprano saxophone) and piano
by Srul Irving Glick (1934-2002) - Canadian composer The Sonata for oboe was commissioned by the Senia Trubashnik on a grant from the Ontario Arts Council in 1987. The oboe has always felt to me to be an instrument that expressed more penetrating and deep human emotions. As a sketch for the piece, I wrote a movement which was an outpouring of dark emotions that I first subtitled "Memorial Prayer for the Ninth Day of the Hebrew month of Av", the day when the ancient Temples of Jerusalem were both destroyed in 587BCE and 70CE and which marked the beginning of an almost 200 year old exile of Jews from the ancient country of Israel. In this sketch, I quoted a melodic fragment from the cantillation of the Lamentations of Jeremiah which are traditionally chanted on this bitter day in the Jewish calendar. When I showed this sketch to Mr. Trubashnik, his enthusiasm for this material gave me the impetus to use this sketch as the second movement of the new Sonata. 
With this sombre beginning, in a language that felt so right for the oboe, I created a three-movement work which is performed without pause in a dramatic and poignantly lyrical style, which uses sharp dissonances and occasional percussive punctuation to express grief and anguish. The last movement, however, makes an attempt to find some relief from the darkness of mood of the first two movements and uses some driving dance rhythms and jazz inflections to lighten the atmosphere. Towards the end of this last movements there is a return to the aggressively poignant material of the first movement, but the pieces ends with a continuance of the driving dance rhythms of the third movement and a cadenza-like coda brings the work to an end with an exuberant and energetic flourish. 
Duration: 18:00