I have written a number of works with Tryst in the title, and in fact I established a music festival in Ayrshire in 2014, The Cumnock Tryst. This all came out of a poem of the same name by Scottish writer William Soutar, which I grew to love. I set it initially as a song for my folk group, and then ‘classicised’ it as ‘A Scots Song’. It is a love poem in the Scots language and I set it to sound like an old Scots folk song.
Since then I have taken the melody and used it as the basis of variation forms in a miniature for violin and piano After The Tryst, and in a substantial orchestral work, Tryst. I suppose it was inevitable that I would one day write Before the Tryst! That is the subtitle for this Sonata for Violin and Piano, dedicated to Simone Lamsma.
The music goes back to some of the original materials again, and the ghost of folk song can be detected at various points throughout. The sonata is written in one through-composed movement, covering a journey through different moods and speeds. It begins dreamily with delicate falling patterns on the piano and wispy, expressive fragments for violin. The solo writing becomes more bold, before the soloist delivers a fuller and more emotional statement.
Gradually the opening mood gives way to a lilting dance figure and an energetic ‘presto.’ The violin writing becomes more exaggerated with rolling glissandi, before stuttering to a halt. Various attempts are made to recapitulate these main ideas, before the lilting music reasserts itself in a more determined and developed form. It is eventually interrupted by the fast, rushing presto.
The slower ‘folkier’ theme returns, this time on the piano, and the opening ‘dreamy’ music also comes back in a new guise. This gives way to a faster coda, where both instruments play as one, in aggressive octaves. Something of the original serenity returns in deep warm chords on the piano as the violin fragments shorten and die away.
Sir James MacMillan
