Wit, Wisdom, Verve Music for Violin and Piano
Gavin Plumley
Born 50 kilometers north of Athens, in Chalcis, Nikos Skalkottas moved with his family to the Greek capital when he was two years old. He had the good luck to be born into a musical family, particularly on his father’s side, who, along with Skalkottas’s uncle, encouraged the young musician in his studies. After graduating from the Athens Conservatory— where his fellow students included Dimitri Mitropoulos—as a violinist, he moved to Berlin in 1921 and eventually joined the composition class of Arnold Schoenberg at the Prussian Academy of Arts, an extraordinary hotbed of creativity and exchange. He returned to his homeland in 1933, where he continued to write tonal, free-atonal, and serial works, though the latter were always informed by a spirit of spontaneity and wit, until his untimely death in 1949. A significant part of Skalkottas’s impulsive approach to serialism was his ability, like Alban Berg, to bend the tenets of twelve-tone composition to more tonal ends. The thematic material in the second movement of his Petite Suite No. 1 for violin and piano, for instance, composed in 1946, is based on a seven-note melody, with the other five notes of the row providing accompanimental motifs. This simpler brand of serialism fits well with the Greek folksong that constitutes the Andante and provides a marked contrast with the hustle and bustle of the first movement. Contained within that opening Preludio’s hectic charge is a swaggering dance in parallel fifths. And there is a similarly strutting quality to the final movement, headed “Like a Peasant Dance,” the parallel fourths and sixths of which provide a distorted reflection of the first movement. 17
