The work was initially completed in the early days of Ives' post-educational tenure: he begin it in 1904-1914 and first completed and published it in 1920. He revised it a number of times and definitively published it as a Second Edition in 1947. It was with the first complete recording
by John Kirkpatrick as an early LP on Columbia around that time that its reputation was fully secured. All these years later it has gradually and definitively outpaced.competing sonatas to become a true watershed work of the past century.
I find that every recording I have heard of the Concord, which by now totals a significant number, has something definite to offer. The deeply probing chromatics, dissonances and rubato oriented chordal melodic attacks, the cascades of advanced harmonic lining, the clusters of notes, the quotation and collaging of Americana motifs, the entire thrust of the work over time, its transcendental musicality, all make it as important a sonata of the last century as we can have and an important milestone for Modernism as we see it today. Interestingly enough we can still draw parallels with the more important tone poem piano works of the later Romantic Era. Yet Ives carved a distinctive language that set it apart from those foreshadows, so it was similar only in having a literal subject matter.
It was not entirely disseminated until the first recorded release in 1948. After that, eventually, there have been scores of recordings and though I am sure I missed a few I cannot say I did not gain something from every version I have heard. There are those with the optional flute and viola parts, frenetic ones, more deeply stoic and/or philosophical channelings and so forth. All versions I have heard express Ives in convincing ways, some of course perhaps more than others.
Today we have a new version by pianist Donald Berman (Avie CD 2678) and it is a good one. Berman handles Ives in ways that make us realize even further how seminal this music is. Berman is somberly meditative at times, as a kind of musical philosophicality, then nicely jagged and expressionist as Ives imagined it. The arpeggiated dissonances are rubato drenched and markedly Modernist as Ives virtually invented for himself. The quotations and the first theme from the Alcotts movement are played with a literal care mostly and that seems right. Sometimes he varies in those passages from marching rhythm just a tad and I understand it but I also like versions with the melodic contours a little more even keeled, In the end it is his touch and it all comes across as personal and committed, which no doubt Ives would have liked. Some of the quotations are articulated with a tenderness for, say, things long past but highly regarded, recollections of a poetic demeanor. All that understandably works well..
The addition of the short but exciting and advanced Ives composition "The St. Gaudens 'Black March'" is a decided plus and nicely played to boot.
In all, the pianist is virtually fearless, and plays with a healthy confidence in the place of all this today which was not always the case with earlier readings--before we came completely to accept and understand the mystical historicism, and that is of course for the best. The rubato clusters of notes are marvelously poetic here. and to me they sound perfect, though of course there are other ways of articulating them as we hear in other versions. Still this is a superb sympathy and we are all the better for it.Bravo.
Listen to a free stream of the album on YouTube:
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