Prokofiev began sketching his First Violin Sonata in 1938, but its premiere performance didn’t take place until today’s date in 1946, some eight years later, when the great Ukrainian violinist David Oistrakh performed it in Moscow.

Between 1938 and 1946, dramatic changes occurred in Prokofiev’s world. In 1936, after years abroad, the composer returned to the Soviet Union, wooed by official promises of both creative and personal privileges. Within a year of Prokofiev’s return, however, the infamous “Great Terror” was unleased by Stalin, whose secret police arrested millions of Soviet citizens for offenses real, suspected, or imagined.

Patrons, friends, and creative partners of the composer were rounded up, including Nataliya Sats, who had commissioned Peter and the Wolf. She was one of the lucky ones, surviving years in a labor camp. Many others were summarily executed shortly after their arrests. The most recent estimates suggest that almost 1 million Soviets citizens were killed or died in labor camps during the Stalin’s Great Terror.

Against this dark background, Prokofiev began work on his Violin Sonata No 1 in F minor, Op 80, in 1938, but after completing the first movement and part of the second, put the score aside for six years, completing it only at the urging of Oistrakh, who recalled that while rehearsing the Sonata, Prokofiev told him that the rushing scale passages in the first and final movements should sound "like the wind in a graveyard.”