Each of the four-movements is dedicated to one of the four commissioning players, people with whom I have worked in the past; each movement is built from a theme based on the player's name, echoing the Renaissance technique of soggetto cavato to encode the names of the collaborators into the piece, in the compositional tradition extended from Josquin to Bach to Ravel.

The movements present these soggetti in distinct characters, echoing the characters of their dedicatees: the first movement is a heroic evocation of the expressive virtuosity of Romanticism; the second is a dynamic scherzo where its core meccanico character becomes increasingly ferocious and angular; the third in a geometric transformation of the theme; the last is a playful dance combining the virtuosity, harmonic patterning, and intense metric play of all the movements. Distinct cadenzas for each player are found in movements I and IV.

The project developed through a pandemic-driven effort to reconnect with past collaborators. Rommel Fernandes, Principal of the Minas Gerais Orchestra performed a piece of mine in Belo Horizonte in 2010; social media reconnection in 2021 with him inaugurated the idea of a violin sonata. The project was then joined by two artists with whom I had worked for several decades in the past. Hanna Yu (Seoul Korea) played a piece of mine while she was a graduate student; Peter Stein (Köln) is a noted chamber musician who played an early work of mine in 1995. Nurit Pacht (New York) is a more recent collaborator, worked with her on the premiere performance and recordings of my Ars Poetica project in 2022.