Composed just one year after the 1927 premiere of his sweepingly successful operetta Jonny spielt auf, Ernst Krenek's Piano Sonata No. 2, Op. 59 (1928), is a product of those last years before Krenek made his way—one step at a time—into the world of twelve-tone composition. Tonal idioms, abstracted and distorted, loom throughout the sonata like ghosts lingering, bewildered, in some confused, chromatic musical house; thick jazz-inflected harmonies are drawn through wrenching phrases that spin along as if in the hope that that next turn might bring them back to the style of the old Viennese masters—Mozart, Beethoven, or even Brahms. Krenek was soon to tire of this historically derived language, but the Piano Sonata No. 2 is evidence of the extraordinary power that it could have in Krenek's hands—this is most certainly not music that is content to tell its own story in its own way, but rather music that is forever searching, groping in the dark between old and new.

The Sonata No. 2 is in three movements. The first of them opens with a robust and introductory Allegretto liberamente declamation and then runs a course of ever-changing tempos, gushing forward here, running out of steam there. The second movement is a march and trio (Alla marcia, energico) that blusters its way in and around the tonal center of E flat, while the finale is marked Allegro giocoso and ponders a sharp-edged, molto staccato main subject whose ultimate destiny is to be thrown about in imitation between the two hands of the performer.

© Blair Johnston, All Music Guide