Philip Mead’s double-CD recording of the majority of
Charles Ives’s piano music serves to place Ives’s two monumental Sonatas
in the context of several of his smaller pieces. By listening to the
rarely performed Studies and Take-Offs as well as the
wonderful Three-Page Sonata, and Waltz Rondo, one can
perceive the process of Ives’s compositional development in the first
decade of the twentieth-century, as he experimented with ideas, motives,
and new techniques that prepared him for the composition of his two
Sonatas.
The dates assigned to Ives’s works are often problematic
as the larger pieces were not so much "composed" but rather "evolved"
over the period of a decade or more. Ives’s idea to create a musical
depiction of the Concord writers came as early as 1904 with a sketch
for an Alcott Overture, as well as a 1907 Emerson Overture/Piano
Concerto, and a 1909 solo piano work The Celestial Railroad
based Hawthorne’s short story of the same name. With such a long gestation
period for the Concord Sonata, the ideas from this work permeate
much of his other compositions from the same time, and there is a nearly
constant overlap of motives (the BACH theme plays a large role in the
Three-Page Sonata, and the First Sonata, and makes a "guest
appearance" in the Hawthorne movement of the Concord Sonata),
rhythmic ideas, quotations, and harmonies in much of his work from this
period.
Philip Mead’s careful selection of pieces to accompany
the Sonatas gives one a sense of the developmental stages (the drawing
board) of the Ivesian musical language that came to culmination so beautifully
with works like the Fourth Symphony and the Concord Sonata.
These smaller pieces are not to be viewed merely as sketches or referential
works; the Three-Page Sonata, played with impassioned urgency
by Mead, and the Waltz Rondo stand as autonomous entities, albeit
on a much less grand scale than his first and second Sonatas.
Any attempt to critique the interpretation of Ives’s
music must be accompanied by the statement that Ives welcomed and encouraged
a wide range of interpretative decisions. Many parameters are deliberately
left open to the performer, as is clear in the indications from the
First Sonata: "The chorus is an impromptu affair (as is also
the rest to some extent) and may be varied according to the tempo taken",
or "[This section] may be repeated 2 or 3 times ad lib.", or "Either
of these last 5/8th beats may be left out- not both!". In
performance instructions for the Concord Sonata, Ives indicates
that "there are many passages not to be played too evenly and in which
the tempo is not precise or static; it varies usually with the mood
of the day, as well as that of Emerson, the other Concord bards, and
the player. A metronome cannot measure Emerson’s mind and over-soul,
any more than the old Concord Steeple Bell could…The same essay or poem
of Emerson may bring a slightly different feeling when read at sunrise
than when read at sunset." Thus, the performer makes fundamental choices
that sharply individualise each performance. The general impression
I came away with from Philip Mead’s Ives is akin to the famous Ives
photograph by Eugene Smith: Ives clutching onto his walking stick, and
glowering into the camera (but with a roguish twinkle in the eye). Mead
enjoys the angularity of Ives’s phrasing, the sudden outbursts of an
irascible character. He seems to create tight order in music that could
seem improvisatory. His Emerson (rather on the quick side) highlights
an intuitive form that in other performances can seem rambling.
What seems lacking are the "transcendental" elements,
those aspects that inspired Ives to write in his 82-page program note
"Essays before a Sonata": "Thus is Emerson always beating down through
the crust towards the first fire of life, of death, and of eternity"
or " There is an ‘oracle’ at the beginning of the Fifth Symphony
- in those four notes lie one of Beethoven’s greatest messages…
the Soul of humanity knocking at the door of the Divine mysteries, radiant
in the faith that it will be opened - and the human become the
Divine!" When one hears Ives’s own recordings of material from Emerson,
one hears less a performance of a particular piece of music, and more
a rapturous musical exploration into philosophic, spiritual, and intellectual
realms.
Mead’s performance of Hawthorne (the second
movement of the Concord Sonata, functioning in this very loose
sonata structure as the Scherzo movement) seems to begin in an environment
that is too mundane, too real. Going back to Ives’s Essays, I have difficulty
finding the elements in Mead’s interpretation that are "dripping wet
with the supernatural, the phantasmal, the mystical - so surcharges
with adventures, from the deeper picturesque to the illusive fantastic".
Mead’s Hawthorne generates excitement and energy, but through
pianistic force - the music stays on the ground. There could be more
rhythmic strength in the March and Ragtime sections (listening to Ives’s
own recording in which he accompanies himself singing a particularly
raucous version of "They are There" shows how powerful and supple his
own rhythmic instinct was). The third movement, The Alcotts,
is played in a simple, unaffected way, full of sentiment without relying
on sentimentality.
Mead’s depiction of Thoreau seems too local. It joins
Thoreau during his day at Walden Pond, without, however, conveying a
sense for the fundamental, mystical discovery that Thoreau (according
to Ives) was experiencing there. Mead carefully clears out much of the
pedal resonance, allowing changes of harmony to be heard, but in doing
so disturbs the "vibration of the universal lyre" (Essays) that the
music and text imply. The entrance of the flute on the second to last
page of the 68-page score has always seemed to me to be conceptually
brilliant, but difficult to realize effectively. John Kirkpatrick, the
pianist who premiered the Sonata, chose to leave out this flute part.
Perhaps in Mead’s recording the flute could have been less soloistic,
and less present - Thoreau’s flute heard at dusk over Walden Pond from
a great distance.
When we come to music with less lofty programmatic
intentions, such as the First Sonata, and several of the Studies,
one cannot help but ask the following question: Why does much of Ives’s
music that depicts baseball games, country fairs, and Connecticut life
from the 1880s and 1890s sound so elemental and epic? In the First
Sonata there are moments of levity (the scherzo movements (2a, 2b,
4a, and 4b), but the majority is quite ponderous. Mead brings out the
struggle and the angularity of this music. The first movement is played
in a directional and disciplined way, allowing for a wonderful contrasting
moment of repose at the end of the movement with the first full statement
of the "theme", the hymn tune of Lebanon. The four (!) scherzo
movements could use a more celebratory sense of abandon, with a stronger
rhythmic drive, and one can imagine the third movement reaching a much
more ecstatic pitch at the climax on the What a Friend We Have in
Jesus-theme.
To conclude, it is important to mention the evident
care for and devotion to Ives’s music that Philip Mead displays: From
his introductory CD liner notes on the piano music of Ives to the choice
(in conjunction with his producer David Lefeber) of recording space
and piano used, all in order to create a sonic environment more conducive
to Ives’s music than the generic "digital" sound of most contemporary
recordings.
Heather O’Donnell
Philip Mead (piano)