Prokofiev wrote the Flute Sonata in 1943, in wartime evacuation, in the middle of War and Peace. He said he wanted something “with classical, clear, transparent sonority” — and what came out is a sonata in D major that behaves as if the previous thirty years had not happened. No irony, no grimacing. Sviatoslav Richter and the flautist Nikolai Kharkovsky premiered it in Moscow on 7 December 1943.
The following year David Oistrakh talked him into rewriting it for violin, which became the Second Violin Sonata, Op. 94bis, and that version is now played roughly ten times as often. Flautists have a legitimate grievance here. The piece is native to the flute — the long, wide-interval melody in the first movement, the way the third movement sits in the instrument’s weakest register and asks it to sing there anyway. On the violin all of that is merely beautiful. On the flute it is beautiful and slightly precarious, which is better.
Emmanuel Pahud, recorded in 1992, when he was about twenty-two:
Written during the worst years of the century, and it declines to mention them. That is a position, not an evasion.