This excellent budget
disc enters a surprisingly crowded field.
There are many fine recordings of Ives’s
astounding Concord Sonata, chief
among them being Marc-André Hamelin
(New World), Gilbert Kalish (Nonesuch)
and a super-budget
rival from Alexei Lubimov on Warner
Apex. There is also a new release form
the phenomenal Pierre-Laurent Aimard
on Warner which, like the others, has
a very different coupling to this Naxos
(in Aimard’s case, a group of Ives’s
fine songs). If coupling is important,
then you may want to do some serious
comparative listening, but if the massive
sonata is your main concern (as it surely
will be), then you should give Steven
Mayer’s recording a try.
From the outset, there
is no doubting his all-important technical
capabilities. As is well documented,
all the movements are affectionate musical
portraits of the New England transcendentalist
writers that Ives admired. The longest
and most complex is the first movement,
Emerson. The sheer density of this section,
much of it on three staves and with
no bar lines, makes it a nightmare for
the pianist, not just getting round
the plethora of notes but making musical
and structural sense of it. It is to
Mayer’s credit that his finely sculpted
playing does just that, and his fairly
steady tempo helps him give balance
between the contrasting material within
the movement. This may not be the free-wheeling
display of bravura that marks out Hamelin’s
playing, but it is thrillingly vital
and concentrated in its own right.
In the scherzo-like
second movement (Hawthorne) Mayer wisely
ignores Ives’s indication that the music
be played as ‘fast as possible’, opting
for a sensible pace that allows the
music to breathe whilst still hinting
at the fantastical nature of the inspiration.
This is the movement that includes the
famous note clusters, usually played
with strips of wood. I admire Mayer’s
lack of sensationalism here, and what
emerges is uncannily Debussy-like (or
even Messiaen-like) in its impressionistic
wash of sound.
The glorious slow movement,
a nostalgic yet unsentimental portrait
of the Alcott family, shows Mayer finely
tuned to the innocence and purity of
Ives’s vision. As the composer himself
commented in the essay that prefaces
this music ‘…there sits the old spinet-piano
that Sophia Thoreau gave to the Alcott
children, on which Beth played the old
Scotch airs, and played at the Fifth
Symphony’. He means Beethoven’s Fifth,
of course which, along with the Hammerklavier,
permeates this movement and the entire
sonata. This movement also uses the
hymn tune Martyn, and the whole
is immensely affecting, particularly
the build towards the grand climax.
This has to be one of the composer’s
most noble utterances, and I was also
aware in this performance of how uncannily
it sounded like one of those long solo
improvisations from jazz pianist Keith
Jarrett.
The last movement is
a deceptively calm portrait of Thoreau
which, after a central climax, unwinds
in a long closing section of great eloquence.
The final tune, a relative to the sonata’s
opening theme, was characterised by
the composer as ‘a human-faith melody,
transcendent and sentimental enough
for the enthusiast and the cynic’. I
doubt there will be many cynics after
listening to Steven Mayer’s beautifully
judged playing, the sort of performance
that has you marvelling afresh at the
sheer scale and originality of Ives’s
vision. It may be a downside to some
that the optional flute and viola parts
are left out, but I doubt you’ll really
miss them.
The fillers are interesting
and worthwhile. The Emerson Transcriptions
are basically a reworking of material
from the sonata’s first movement into
a 5-minute improvisation.
The Celestial Railroad
also uses music from the sonata, in
this case the Hawthorne movement, and
goes a stage further in trying to convey
the metaphysical nature of the inspiration.
The jokily-titled Varied Air and
Variation give an accurate and compact
idea of Ives’s sense of humour, albeit
with a genuine concern for what the
concert pianist has to endure. The dissonant,
hyper-chromatic writing is very much
‘in your face’ stuff, brilliantly brought
off by Mayer, who one can imagine enjoying
playing this as an encore at his own
concerts.
A very successful disc
overall. The sound is good rather than
great, with a pleasing acoustic but
the odd rasp on the piano (around D
octave above middle C) that is caught
by the microphone. Excellent notes are
by the wonderfully named H. Wiley Hitchcock.
Worth considering.
Tony Haywood
Steven Mayer (piano) 