Fifteen years separate Ernst Krenek's second and third piano sonatas—15 years during which Krenek adopted twelve-tone techniques, during which his career in Vienna began to crumble under the Nazi regime and he moved to the United States, and during which the most costly and all-encompassing war in history broke out. No surprise, then, that the two works would seem at first glance to be far more dissimilar than similar; yet, at heart, they are clearly the work of the same man—a man whose need to search through the new is matched by an equal need to establish beauty as defined by very old and "reliable" aesthetic laws.

The Piano Sonata No. 3, Op. 92 No. 4, may be a twelve-tone work, but it is far less gut-wrenching than its predecessor of 15 years earlier—far calmer, far leaner, far softer in both texture and dynamic, and more traditionally melodic. But it is still compellingly dramatic—it does not crash its way through old and new in an electrifying search for new musical "life," as does the Piano Sonata No. 2, but rather establishes its own realm and then tells a unified story.

Krenek dutifully notes on the score of the Piano Sonata No. 3, Op. 92 No. 4, that he began work on it in St. Paul, MN, on the second-to-last day of December 1942 and finished work in that same city in late May 1943; it is the fourth and last of a series of sonatas for diverse instruments (organ, flute, and viola being the others). The piece is in four movements: 1. Allegretto piacevole, animato e flessibile; 2. Theme, Canons and Variations (Andantino); 3. Scherzo (Vivace); and 4. Adagio. Krenek made a revised version of the Piano Sonata No. 3 in 1960.

© Blair Johnston, All Music Guide