Title: Sonate für Violine und Klavier op. 18 (1887)
Description: Based on traditional sonata form, this expressive piece contains distinctive Straussian characteristics evident in his later symphonic settings and operas. Strauss appreciated this work very much and performed it often. The new attractive notation of this edition should be another incentive for every serious violinist to perform, as Strauss did himself, this most beautiful early work. - Publisher.

The Sonata is roughly contemporaneous with the famous symphonic fantasy Aus Italien and the famous tone poem Don Juan, and the proximity is everywhere apparent in the music. Velvety melody and a certain refined manner of self-indulgence fill the pages of each of the work's three movements. However, in the finale the velvet is ruffled a bit, and that self-indulgence is in part replaced by self-willed urgency. The piano announces the beginning of the Allegro ma non troppo first movement with a gently heroic idea -- like an echo of some triumph long past -- whose basic contours will ultimately generate a fair portion of the movement's stock. A beautiful, flowing melody emerges some 20 bars later, but this is just a subsidiary to that opening idea. Another beautiful, flowing melody, this one in B flat major and marked espressivo e appassionato, serves as the proper second theme. The second movement is called Improvisation and marked Andante cantabile. Improvised it is not: this is a very carefully crafted instrumental song. The finale begins with nine bars of sepulchral Andante introduction for the piano alone; Allegro is the tempo of the movement proper, whose initial, symphonic thrust is so compelling that it prompts the violin to explode with a frenzy of sixteenth notes. When everything has been said, the two instruments agree on blatant heroism for the close of the Sonata. - Blair Johnston at allmusic.com