Jascha Heifetz had little patience with the notion that contemporary music should be left to specialist performers, or segregated from the classics in concert series of its own. Just as Joachim and Sarasate and Wieniawski had performed music composed in their time, he felt a similar responsibility to the music of his own time. He had a productive curiosity about it, delighted in bringing new music into being and did not limit his enthusiasm to the most fashionable creative eminences of the day.Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco produced an enormous quantity of works in virtually every known category, all marked by a high level of craftsmanship and imagination. As a Jew, he was compelled to flee his native Italy in 1939, settling eventually in the Los Angeles area, where many other European composers as well as Heifetz himself lived. By that time Heifetz had been playing Castelnuovo-Tedesco's music for more than a decade; he had commissioned The Lark for violin and piano in 1930 and performed his first concerto (the Concerto italiano of 1924) with the New York Philharmonic the following year. He gave the premiere of the Concerto No. 2 with the same orchestra under Toscanini on April 12,1933; it was the first work in the impressive list of concertos written for him, a list subsequently extended by such composers as William Walton, Miklós Rózsa, Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Louis Gruenberg.The second concerto was given the subtitle The Prophets, and its three movements bear the names of Isaiah, Jeremiah and Elijah. While the richly evocative music may be said to be more or less Hebraic in character, the composer stated he had no specific programmatic intent but hoped only to suggest in a very general way the flaming eloquence of the ancient prophets among the surrounding voices of the people and voices of nature. Born in Belfast, Howard Ferguson intended at first to be a pianist, and after studying with Harold Samuel he enjoyed a brief career as a performer before devoting himself to composition. Among his major works is a piano concerto, which Dame Myra Hess introduced in 1952; the following year he produced the Overture for an Occasion, and he made an American tour playing his own works. His chamber music compositions include an octet for winds and strings and two violin sonatas. Composed in 1931, the Sonata No. 1 is one of his earliest works.The Khachaturian whose violin sonata follows here is not the famous Aram but his nephew Karen, born in Moscow in 1920 and still active there. After studying with Shebalin, Shostakovich and Miaskovsky at the Moscow Conservatory, he joined that institution's faculty himself. He has earned recognition as a composer of opera, ballet, choral and orchestral works, chamber music, children's pieces and film scores. Like the Ferguson sonata, Khachaturian's is a very early work— the first its composer presented to the public (in 1947).Heifetz's keyboard partner in these two sonata performances, Lillian Steuber, was a faculty colleague at the University of Southern California, where they collaborated in a sonata series. She performed as soloist with such conductors as Rodzinski, Klemperer and Wallenstein, and William Schuman composed his piano cycle Voyage for her.Both of the works that frame this program were completed in 1933. The French composer Jean Franaix was only 21 when he produced his Trio in C that year, but he had already earned recognition for his witty Concertino for piano and orchestra, and in 1933 he also wrote his brilliant ballet score Scuola di ballo. The concise and vivacious trio is a celebration of the neoclassical spirit in vogue at the time. In the first movement, played with muted strings, the viola has a motif spelling Bach in reverse, the notes B, C, A, B-flat corresponding to HCAB in German notation. The violin's lovely solo in the third movement is also muted, but the scherzo and finale are extrovert romps.Joseph de Pasquale had just become principal violist of the Philadelphia Orchestra when he recorded this work with Heifetz and Piatigorsky. He had served in the same position in the Boston Symphony Orchestra and recorded Strauss's Don Quixote with Piatigorsky under Charles Munch. With his three brothers, also members of the Philadelphia Orchestra, he formed the De Pasquale Quartet.—Richard Freed