Aurel Stroe: Piano Sonata No. 3 – In Palimpsest (1991). Patterns of Musical Composition

"The aim underlying the analysis is to highlight patterns of the composer’s mature musical thinking through. Accordingly, the case study of his Piano Sonata No. 3 captured the implementation of the poetic idea of palimpsest at different levels of musical micro- and macrostructure. Although the component parts come from three different periods, they form a unified whole not only through the uniform projection of the macrostructure, but also at the micro level through the similar models of architectural and thematic processing. While Stroe uses the variation technique on a single thematic element in the movements composed in 1947 and 1957, in the more recent movements from 1991, parts three and five, he brings several different thematic elements in the discourse: see the five elements of the first movement; the four voices of the second movement; the two accords and one cluster of the final movement. At the same time, he diversifies the modeling patterns: see the free architecture of the first movement; the virtuosity of the polyphonic form in the palimpsest of the second movement; the technique of development by symmetrical addition in the last movement, etc. It is a creative contemporary mindset that develops logically structured models of musical architecture."