This concert was live-streamed as part of the Wigmore Hall Spring Series. The video is no longer online but other concerts are available to watch in full here: Wigmore Hall Concert Video Library

“I looked and I fell in love,” was Stravinsky’s reaction to the works of Pergolesi which were the inspiration for his 1919 ballet score, Pulcinella. Stravinsky drew on this score 1932 to make up the Suite italienne for violin and piano; in the same year, Messiaen wrote his Theme and Variations as a wedding present for his first wife, the violinist Claire Delbos. Lili Boulanger wrote her Nocturne in 1911 at the age of 18, before starting formal composition studies; D’un matin de printemps was written in 1918, the year of her death. “Wind passing through a graveyard…” is Prokofiev’s description of the hauntingly ethereal passage at the end of the first movement of the Violin Sonata No. 1, perhaps the darkest, most lamenting music Prokofiev ever wrote.