Lincoln Performance Hall

Violinist Tomás Cotik and pianist Shinmyung Rho trace the French violin tradition across two world wars. Lili Boulanger and Claude Debussy died within ten days of each other in March 1918 — Boulanger at twenty-four, the first woman to win the Premier Grand Prix de Rome; Debussy leaving a Violin Sonata that was both his last completed work and the last music he played in public. Poulenc wrote his sonata in occupied Paris in 1943, inscribed to the memory of Federico García Lorca. The evening ends with Ravel’s Second Sonata, with its central blues movement, and Tzigane. Program: Boulanger, Deux Morceaux; Debussy, Sonata in G minor; Poulenc, Sonata for Violin and Piano; Ravel, Sonata No. 2 in G major and Tzigane. $30 general admission, free for PSU students, faculty and staff.

Brahms’s three violin sonatas complete in one evening. The program closes with the Scherzo in C minor that the twenty-year-old Brahms contributed to the collaborative “F-A-E” Sonata, written with Robert Schumann and Albert Dietrich in 1853 as a surprise for the violinist Joseph Joachim — who was handed the manuscript at a gathering in the Schumann household, played it through with Clara Schumann, and correctly named the composer of every movement. Program: Sonata No. 1 in G major, Op. 78; Sonata No. 2 in A major, Op. 100; Sonata No. 3 in D minor, Op. 108; Scherzo in C minor, WoO 2. $30 general admission, free for PSU students, faculty and staff.