Lush single movement sonata in the late 19th century style—my opus 1—chock-full of drama and lyricism. I composed this in my senior year at UCLA and revised it in my first year in Boston. It was premiered years later in the premiere NuClassix Concert at the First Lutheran Church in Boston.

The piece is structured in a chromatic ascending scale so that the section go harmonically G-Ab-A-Bb-B-C-C#-D. The Boston Globe wrote:

To be present was to be reminded again that today's music speaks in many different voices, some of them intent on sounding like yesterday's. Russell Steinberg's lush and warmly romantic Violin Sonata could have come right out of the mid to late-19th century; its expressive vocabulary, which manages to avoid anachornism or camp, might have appealed to such virtuosi as Jan Kubelik or Eugene Ysaye.