The 1987 Scherzo Sonata for piano is something of a transitional work for composer Daniel Asia. Though still requiring exceptionally high performance standards in an uncompromising idiom, it allows the interpreter to contribute greater individual poetry and nuance than do Asia's earlier works.

Asia describes all his music as "quasi-tonal," at least in the sense that each composition tends to work back around to the harmonic region in which it begins. The primary tonality of the Scherzo Sonata, for example, is D. The opening melodic fragment starts on the note D, and the first movement ends on the dominant, A flat. The final movement closes the work out in D, and three of the inner movements-the scherzi that give the sonata its name-each begin by emphasizing the major third interval of D and F sharp. Even listeners who find such a description too technical can sense that the music keeps returning to a harmonic "home," that Asia is not merely splattering his thematic elements around the keyboard at random.

Asia wrote the sonata especially for Jonathan Shames, who premiered it at Cornell University in 1987. The work capitalizes on Shames's virtuosic abilities as well as his poetic tendencies. Intense hailstorms of notes periodically subside into ethereal calm over the course of this seven-movement work.

The sonata is an arch, beginning and ending with related Adagio movements that frame three thematically linked scherzi, which are separated from each other by a piquant Allegretto and a rarefied Adagietto. The two distant, mysterious outer movements work through related material, basically a descending scale fragment.

A moto perpetuo rhythmic motive and then a short tune form the basis of all three scherzi. Each succeeding scherzo takes the material into more distant regions of the piano, and varies it more extensively. In effect, the three act as one huge scherzo, with the intervening Allegretto and Adagietto serving as trio sections. Asia has described the Allegretto as "a distorted dance movement, which is to be played humorously, with a touch of the pompous." Asia's fondness for the music of Thelonious Monk reveals itself here; the intervals both composers favor as punctuation marks are dissonant, tight little seconds. As for the Adagietto, Asia specifies that it is "to be played in a morose and very contained manner."

The sonata leads a triple life. Asia sheared off the fifth and sixth movements, orchestrated what remained with a few changes and transformed it into his Symphony No. 1. He eventually gave the two forsaken movements their own orchestral garb as Black Light.



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