Roger Zahab - Second violin concerto

Second violin concerto
Date Completed:	December 7, 1990
Duration:	about 24 minutes
Instrumentation:	solo violin and string orchestra (at least 4 vn, 2 va, 2 vc and 1 bass)
First Performance:	November 7, 1991 with the composer as soloist and members of the University of Akron New Music Group, Akron, Ohio
Comments:	to Louis Lane
Program Notes:	The Second Violin Concerto was begun in Meadville, Pennsylvania on 12 July and finished in Akron on 7 December 1990. Cast in seven sections - which may not be heard as such because they often share overlapping configurations of material - the soloist is placed in the midst of two groups of string players who play seperately, together, and in hocket. It is a kind of summary of the previous decade and contains a number of references to earlier works in a cloud of variation. The often rather plaintive atmosphere was certainly colored by the long illness and death of my beloved friend Tim Walsh on October 31, 1990. But over all one has the sense that, as Tom Piechowski wrote for our opera "Hegemony": The World turns and Justice swings. Rarely, if ever, does death end Life. It mutates the Form it implies. The ever-turning constellations of musical ideas are reflected not only in the antiphonal nature of the work and the variation-cycles, but also in the way that some ideas are repeated exactly in differing contexts while others sing once and are heard from no more.