The Sonatina in C minor remains far and away my favorite out of the five piano sonatinas, and the third movement is definitely the highlight. I love it so much. It made me happy when I composed it, and the damn thing made me happy just listening to the electric performance today. The third movement has the freaking fuguette in it, which is something I had wanted to do since the beginning of the project.
I love Beethoven’s Pastoral Sonata and could actually play the first movement of that sonata back in the day when I could still scrap together the time and energy to practice the piano. I could never actually play it that well. The ability to play loud and soft simultaneously was one of those skills that simply escaped me. There’s reasons for this having to do with not taking up the piano until I was around seventeen and then discovering I’m a converted lefty.
I suppose there’s a slight possibility it’s a touch of dyslexia, but I prefer the converted-lefty theory. Learning to write was just hell. It was more kinds of hell than I can possibly describe, and for whatever reason I will never ever understand, it simply did not occur to me to try using my left hand. It never came up. It was never presented as an option or possibility. It just wasn’t in the cards.
I hated learning to write. It made my brain hurt so much that I would just sit at my desk crying. Naturally, the teachers thought I was just throwing a tantrum or something about being forced to learn to write.
Nope, I was in pain. I was in serious inarticulable pain, but this has been a digression that I never intended to take.
My point—and I did have a point—is that I really, really loved cramming a fugette into the C minor Sonatina, and what’s really fascinating is just how quickly I lost interested in doing a proper fugue. It’s barely a suggestion of fugue. It’s all intense joy and repetition of the fugal subject.
Anyway, all three movements of the Sonatina in C minor have now been posted on my little-old website. Next up is the Sonatina in B-flat Major.