Eduard de Boer: Pazienza - Sonata per violino e pianoforte (2025)

Описание: 00:00 I. Prospettiva infranta / Broken Perspective
09:06 II. Aspettando la primavera / Waiting for Spring
17:32 III. Finalmente / Finally

The situation in the world from 2020 onwards made my wife and I long for a place to live in the midst of nature. In 2024, we got the chance to make this dream come true: we bought a beautiful house in Piedmont, northern Italy. We were promised that the renovation of this house would be completed in December of that year, so we put our house in the Netherlands up for sale in good time and arranged the move to Italy.

But... just one week before the moving date, our Dutch contact in Italy suddenly told us that the renovation would not be finished on time and the house would not be ready to move into. At that point, the dates for the transfer of our Dutch house and for the move had already been set, and all our belongings were already packed in moving boxes! Fortunately, there is also a small garden shed on our property in Piedmont, with a small living room, a bedroom and a bathroom. With a few simple modifications, this cottage could be made habitable, and we were able to stay there for the time being.

We moved in on the day of the winter solstice, armed against the cold with a small wood-burning stove and a supply of firewood. It turned out that the main house was not so much not ready as that virtually nothing had been done yet. It would be another 4½ months before we could move in. For my wife and me, that winter was the coldest we had ever experienced. Not so much because of the temperature – after all, we come from the Netherlands – but mainly because of the limited resources we had available to heat our primitive and poorly insulated living room. And the cold lasted a long time. We needed our wood-burning stove until May of the following year.

But at last, our long wait was rewarded. Since the end of April 2025, we have been living in our new dream home, and this violin sonata is one of the first compositions I wrote in my new study.

The sonata's outer movements contain references to Italian music, such as Vivaldi's Violin Concerto Spring from The Four Seasons and popular Piedmontese melodies such as Piemontesina Bella and, towards the end of the last movement, La Corenta.

A big thank you to Bram Heemskerk for having stimulated and enabled me to write this composition!