About the creation

In her Piano Sonata, Rachel Galinne examines her close relationship with the piano, which she began studying at an early age. According to Galinne, whose style combines contemporary sonorities and traditional writing, she began improvising as a child, while learning to read music. In her improvisations she attempted at first to imitate the style of the great composers whom she got to know during her piano studies, but later refrained from fixed rhythm and from continuous melodic lines, compositional techniques to which she was exposed at a later stage. While the first movement of the Sonata, which opens with a series of tone clusters, demonstrates a contemporary compositional style, the second movement is a funeral march, influenced by slow movements of Beethoven and Schubert. The third movement, inspired mainly by the finale of Beethoven’s Waldstein Sonata, combines both styles. Despite the varied movements, the appearance of similar motives and the variations on the funeral march connect all the parts of the work, turning it into one continuous narrative. The Sonata, which reflects the treatment of the piano as a lyrical instrument on the one hand and a percussive instrument on the other, poses a “mirror” in front of the piano literature of the 19th to the 21st century, and expresses the way in which this literature influenced Galinne’s compositional style. The Sonata was premiered in 2019 by Ofra Yitzhaki and recorded by Hagai Yodan.