A.J. Scholz : Sonata No2 : DOz

A.J. Scholz (rev.Giorgio Mirto)

Les Productions D’Oz:  24 pages

I must be honest that I have almost certainly never seen any music by this composer before .Arthur Johannes Scholz (1883 – 1945) wrote hundreds of guitar works and if this latest piece is anything to go on, it is a style that is extremely complex, never staying in one key for too long, and therefore the music has many accidentals and never goes where you expect it to.

It is set in three movements, with the first one, an Allegro Moderato lasting over 12 pages, and 251 bars of music. I have always prided myself in the fact that I can normally sight read a piece of music and make a decent job of it, but this piece has proved the exception as time and again I came to a complete stop, wondering where I was going to get the next chord. It is set  in E Major and after a few bars of introduction the piece really gets going with a few bars of climbing arpeggios mostly written in demi – semi quaver quintuplets .then an extended passage in triplets takes over with the harmonic style constantly changing , so that you quickly forget where the tonic key in fact is. Just to give you a brief example of the chord structure here, having started in Emajor at bar 1, here at the triplet section it begins with arpeggios of the following:- AbMajor, F7, Bb Minor, G Major, C Minor, A Major, D Minor, Bb Major, G7, and D7.That’s only the first 8 bars. This continues for 32 bars. There are many more examples of this in the long first movement, but eventually it returns to E Major for the coda, preceded incidentally by a G minor chord sequence!

The second movement is a Menuett in A Major. This is again very adventurous harmonically, and its 5 ½ pages are filled with many difficult moments that will take some playing.

The final Rondo is a 2/4 in E Major, with semi – quavers being in evidence the entire time. The writing is in 2 voices, often involving chords and still moving from key top key almost every bar. Not only that it moves around the fingerboard incessantly, and really needs a superb player to do it justice.

So there you have it. I have rarely, if ever, seen a piece of guitar writing so different from everything else, and so complex in its thinking. Wonderful players may find this piece really fascinating, but if you are not as good a player as that, it will be completely out of your league

Chris Dumigan