Three sonatas, three composers, three different universes, but three pieces dating from the same period, the 1930s and 1940s, between the rise of the totalitarian regimes and the Second World War and written for the same forces, a violin-piano duo.

It was the Paris Opéra that saw the 1928 premiere of the ballet Le Baiser de la fée (The Fairy’s Kiss), which Igor Stravinsky concocted from pieces by Tchaikovsky. Movements from this neo-classical score were rearranged in part four years later, with the help of the violinist Samuel Dushkin, under the title Divertimento.

Having returned to his native country, which had become the USSR, Sergei Prokofiev began composing his First Violin Sonata in 1938 for the legendary David Oistrakh, its dedicatee. The work was not to be completed until 1946, and Oistrakh played its two Andante movements at Prokofiev’s funeral.

In the meantime, Francis Poulenc had conceived his own Violin Sonata in occupied Paris in 1942-43 with input from the great violinist Ginette Neveu, who premiered it at the Salle Gaveau in June 1943 with Poulenc at the piano.