Music: Sonata in San Francisco

Violinist Joseph Szigeti was jubilant over the manuscript that had come to him from Soviet Russia. Said he: “When Prokofiev was the very bad boy of music, I pioneered for him, and he has never forgotten.” Twenty-three years ago in Prague it was Szigeti who had started Prokofiev’s masterful Violin Concerto No. 1 on its way to fame. Last week in San Francisco, Szigeti bowed and plucked his way through the U.S. première of Prokofiev’s new Sonata in F.

Szigeti had been letting it “run through my head” for four months, but it was so knotty that he propped the score up before him in San Francisco’s opera house. Of one movement, a furious crossfire between piano and violin, Szigeti said: “It is the ugliest thing going. It is terrific.” After that came a third movement as lyrical as something out of Puccini, followed by a fast, gay finale.

When the sonata was over, San Francisco’s audience bravoed Szigeti to five curtain calls and fans followed him to his dressing room. Glowed Szigeti: “I think it got under their skins. I could feel it taking hold of them. This music—it is inescapable. A German composer could have diluted this sonata into enough material for a couple of symphonies.”