Research
The Ukrainian violin sonata
A doctoral dissertation that gave an overlooked body of repertoire its first comprehensive reading in English — and gave violinists the practical tools to perform it.
Ukrainian Violin Sonata: Performance Analysis of Sonatas for Violin and Piano by Naum Lapynsky and Mykola Silvansky
Doctor of Musical Arts · University of Nevada, Las Vegas · 2022
Twentieth-century Ukrainian composers used the violin sonata to hold two things at once: a national voice, and the contemporary European tradition they were working inside. The sonatas of Naum Lapynsky and Mykola Silvansky sit at the centre of that tension — and until this study, neither had been analysed, or in most cases performed, outside Ukraine.
The dissertation is the first comprehensive English-language analysis of these works. It goes past description: it identifies the specific interpretive problems each sonata sets — motivic articulation, balance between the instruments, folk-inflected intonation, stylistic authenticity — and answers them with phrasing, bowing, pedalling and ensemble solutions a performer can take straight to the stand.
In doing so it moves this repertoire from a national footnote into the working international canon, and gives violinists everywhere a route into music that had been effectively closed to them.
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