The Friends of Music of Stamford will welcome violinist Sophia Stoyanovich and pianist Derek Wang for a recital exploring the many ways relationships have inspired music.
The program, titled Musically Yours: Love Letters in Music, brings together three works: a Romance by Stoyanovich’s father, composer Patrick Stoyanovich; Mozart’s Violin Sonata in E minor; and Richard Strauss’s Violin Sonata in E-flat major.
Sophia Stoyanovich says her father’s Romance has particular personal meaning. A composer based in the Pacific Northwest, Patrick Stoyanovich wrote the piece when his daughter was about 13 or 14 and beginning to develop her skills as a violinist.
“I feel a lot of responsibility with playing his music and doing it justice,” she said.
She also finds the piece distinctive because of her father’s background in jazz. “You get this sort of wonderful combination of big soaring melodies, big, very dramatic, operatic moments, but always sort of propelled by something a little bit more unusual than you might expect from just a romance in the traditional sense,” she said.
Wang first met Stoyanovich when they were both teenagers appearing on the radio program From the Top. He remembers hearing her perform her father’s Romance in Tacoma, Washington, around 2014, when the piece was new.
“I didn't quite expect at that point that here I would be and we would be playing it together and we would be sharing it now with audiences in many of our concerts,” Wang said.
The Mozart sonata offers a very different kind of emotional experience. Wang says the performers were drawn to the relatively understated work because of its connection to a tragic period in Mozart’s life, when the composer’s mother died while the two were traveling together in Paris.
“There are moments where one can't help but compose oneself into the music,” Wang said. He hears an extraordinary sense of loneliness in the Mozart, particularly in the second-movement Minuet, where a brief passage in a major key suggests happiness that quickly disappears.
The program concludes with Strauss’s Violin Sonata, a work that Stoyanovich says manages to suggest the composer’s larger-than-life personality with only two instruments.
“It is quite the challenge,” she said, noting that Wang’s piano part is particularly demanding. She hears in the sonata the same mixture of passionate and virtuosic writing, sentiment and uncertainty that Strauss would later explore on a much larger scale.
For both musicians, that complexity is part of the appeal. Wang says he and Stoyanovich have been playing together since they were students, and their musical partnership has continued to influence their individual artistic work.
He says Stoyanovich has helped shape his understanding of the violin and its many colors, as well as how a pianist can reproduce some of the possibilities of a violinist’s bow.
Their rehearsals aren't always entirely harmonious, however.
“If you were a fly on the wall, at times maybe you would find it very supportive,” Wang said. “At times you would find it somewhat combative.”
He says that is part of what the two musicians enjoy about chamber music: each performer has to advocate for their own part while responding to the other musician. In the Strauss sonata, with its extravagant demands on both instruments, that tension becomes part of the music itself.
The Friends of Music recital featuring violinist Sophia Stoyanovich and pianist Derek Wang will be Sunday, October 18 at 3 p.m. at First Presbyterian Church, 96 Main Street in Stamford. More information is available at friendsmusic.org.