Korngold's chronology is all wrong. He was 11 years old when he wrote his First Piano Sonata, the Second dates from two years later; only the Third, written in his thirties, is a 'mature' work, yet an innocent ear, ignorant of these facts, would guess at quite different datings. The Second Sonata, surely, is the work of a young adult: not yet quite mature, still rather prone to imitating rather than digesting and transforming the styles of his contemporaries and predecessors but already possessing gifts that are perfectly capable of serving his high ambitions. The bold, slightly Brahmsian opening theme immediately announces the scale of the undertaking (the sonata plays for half an hour), the more wayward second subject group includes some appealingly tender, Schumannesque ideas but also others whose chromaticism is more quirkily individual. The scherzo, too, a sort of Mephisto-waltz with a slower middle section that would not be out of place in Schumann's Carnaval, adds personal qualities (a steely angularity and a curious unpredictability of melodic contour) to its obvious models. The opulently romantic slow movement may contain rather too many flamboyant pianistic gestures (Korngold was a prodigy pianist as well, we are reminded throughout these sonatas) but it too has a way of arresting the attention by occasionally taking a mysterious course rather than the expected one. The finale, amiable and capricious by turns, is an agreeable relaxation from what has gone before; the whole sonata would be an impressive achievement for a 21-yearl-old writing in 1910.
The Third Sonata sounds as though it might have been written a couple of years rather than a couple of decades later. The ideas have become a bit more angular and disjunct, there is more skill in thematic transformation and with it a more imaginative use of piano sonority (a striking, trill-bedecked processional in the first movement, a delicate spinning of filigree over deep, slow chords in the Andante), but a tendency to embellish everything with florid ornament leads to an impression of studied doodling in both the later movements. This, one would have said, is the work of a still young composer at a temporary impasse in his development: after two effective movements a mere minuet-like intermezzo and showy moto perpetuo will not do, and one suspects that he knows it.
The First Sonata is clearly the work of a dazzling child: he can impersonate Brahms, Schumann, Richard Strauss and his own teacher Zemlinsky with extraordinary verisimilitude and he can develop his own ideas with remarkable resource and assurance. He is a bit of a chatterbox, and some of the pianistic and emotional gestures do rather have the air of a sailor-suited infant virtuoso who knows very well the effect he is creating: the emotion is feigned, but by an astoundingly gifted and prodigiously equipped mimic.
It is demanding music, technically, and Matthijs Verschoor plays it much more than conscientiously: he is an eloquent advocate. A close recording (the piano action is audible from time to time) but a very clean one.'