Dmitry Kabalevsky's Piano Sonata No. 3 was completed in 1945 as the horrors of World War II in the Soviet Union were finally coming to a close. In the composer's words, "The Sonata lacks a concrete program, yet two themes, two major images: youth and war, prevail here. The collision of those themes and the final triumph of youth sums up the plot of the work!" As such, this sonata made excellent propaganda material for the Soviet state, but it reflected Kabalevsky's true feelings about the war experience as well. Each movement of this spirited, well-crafted sonata brings a confrontation of some kind between youth and war. The Allegro con moto first movement opens with two representations of youth, a bright, quick, almost impetuous theme which trips lightly over the keyboard, followed by a less irrepressible but still lively theme that contains some witty play with rhythms. When the exposition ends, the development begins almost immediately to subject the "youth" themes to the perils of war, welding the formerly high-flying themes to diabolical, motoric rhythms and assailing them with crashes and attacks from the left hand. The themes struggle to break away, but the war music continues to hold sway until suddenly the recapitulation begins and the war music subsides entirely. A nervous mood nonetheless hangs over the recapitulation, and the first theme must fight off one more challenge of war in the coda, which ends slowly and quietly. The second-movement Andante cantabile follows a similar blueprint. It opens with a graceful, wistful theme in triple meter, which is played in two slightly different versions before strife starts to creep in. Subtle dissonances crop up, and become less and less subtle each time they are played; there emerges a sudden predilection for the minor mode. Here, though, when the opening theme comes back, the crashes and explosions of the central section now serve as elaborating devices for an embellished repetition of the first section, suggesting that war has somehow given maturity to youth. An Allegro giocoso closes the sonata, beginning with music that is close in form, if not spirit, to Shostakovich's toy-shop music, with jaunty rhythms and equally jaunty melodies. One of these recalls Richard Strauss' Till Eulenspiegel, and truly Kabalevsky seems enamored of such merry pranks. Here war takes the form of a one-to-the-bar waltz which whirls and storms until it loses its composure entirely, and yields to a spirited reprise of the opening themes.

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