World Premiere: January 13, 1945
Last HSO Performance: March 13, 2016
Instrumentation: 2 flutes, piccolo, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets in B-flat, clarinet in E-flat, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, piano and strings
Duration: 46 minutes

Navarra for Two Violins AND ORCHESTRA, Op. 33 (1889)
(Born March 10, 1844 in Pamplona, Spain)
Died September 20, 1908 in Biaritz, France)

Pablo de Sarasate

Pablo Martín Melitón de Sarasate y Navascuez — economized to Pablo de Sarasate when he became a star — occupied, with Niccolò Paganini and Joseph Joachim, the pinnacle of 19th-century fiddledom. The son of a military bandmaster in Pamplona, Spain, he started violin lessons at five, gave his first public performance at eight, and rocketed past the pedagogical prowess of the best local teachers so quickly thereafter that he had to be sent to the Paris Conservatoire for further instruction with Delphin Alard at the age of twelve. So much promise for furthering the cause of Spanish culture did he show that Queen Isabella presented him with a Stradivarius violin (a handsome piece of booty acquired in a recent tiff with Naples), and personally authorized the subsidy of his expenses. Within a year, he won a premier prix in violin and solfège at the Conservatoire, acquired another prize, in harmony, in 1859, and then set off on the tours of Europe, Africa, North and South America and the Orient that made him one of the foremost musicians of his time. (His first tour of the United States was in 1870; his last in 1889.) His playing drew unstinting praise during the forty years of almost constant, world-wide concertizing that followed, the most impressive evidence of which is the spectacular list of works that were written for him by some of the era’s greatest composers: Bruch’s G minor Violin Concerto and Scottish Fantasy; Saint-Saëns’ Concertos Nos. 1 and 3 and the Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso; Lalo’s Concerto in F minor and Symphonie espagnole; Joachim’s Variations for Violin and Orchestra; Wieniawski’s Second Concerto; Dvořák’s Mazurek; and Mackenzie’s Pibroch Suite. Whereas Paganini was noted for his flamboyant technical wizardry and emotional exuberance, and Joachim for his high-minded intellectualism and deep musical insights, Sarasate was famed for his elegance, precision, apparent ease of execution and, in the words of Eduard Hanslick, the Vienna-based doyen of Europe’s music critics, his “stream of beautiful sound.” No less an authority than the great violinist Eugene Ysaÿe said, “It was he who taught us to play exactly.” Sarasate was also a keen chamber music participant, and he was among the early champions of Brahms’ quartets, though he declined to play that master’s Violin Concerto. The handful of recordings he made shortly before his death in Biarritz in 1908, the first commercial discs made by a world-famous violinist, attest to his remarkable skill.

Among the many small violin compositions that Sarasate devised for his own use is the brilliant Navarra for Two Violins and Piano, which would have been a handy (and savvy) public relations vehicle for featuring a local virtuoso on his tour performances. This vibrant and virtuosic waltz, which keeps the two violins tightly in tandem throughout, not only evokes Sarasate’s native region in northern Spain, but also bears the traces of his wide travels through Europe, most notably in its distinctively Viennese lilt.