Sonata No. 3, Opus 46

By Dmitri Kabalevsky

This is a great piece, and really fun!

This piece is much more appealing than the last review will have you believe - though really, it does just boil down to a matter of opinion. It is at times joyful, at times nostalgic; it ranges from the exuberance of youth to the horrors and chaos of war (two themes...

the composer himself says the piece is about). The "opening lick" is actually featured in all three movements and even ends the whole piece; I'd call that extremely clever and a nod to great motivic composers like Beethoven and Liszt. It's not just a load of noise, how many 20th century pieces tend to sound; Kabalevsky sticks to old-fashioned tonality for the most part, with the a bit of major-minor interplay. It's a truly fun and acrobatic piece to play. I've been studying piano for 15 years and am finishing up my undergrad in piano pedagogy; this will be one of my senior recital pieces. mkn

Even Horowitz, as brilliant as he is, can not make this composition sound attractive. This piece took me about a year to learn, and the rewards just weren't there. Some nice moments now and then, but the music has much ugliness about it. The writing is either too thick...

, or too thin, and the whole thing comes off as brutish. There is a clever use of motivic diminution, based on the opening lick, in the "fade-out" ending of the first movement. The third movement is just plain weird, with scales running willy-nilly into the extrema of the keyboard. However, the clever insinuation of the folk song "Malinka, Ma-ya" is a redeeming feature. The second movement does have a nice melody split between the hands, but again, the general wierdness of the sonata creeps in through thin writing and rather "forced" tonal shifts. It takes alot of practice to get this unwieldy ship afloat. Sorry, I tried. My background is PhD in theory, and 20 years of piano lessons.