Piano Sonata No. 2

On the 150th anniversary of the birth of Charles Ives - acclaimed by his champion Leonard Bernstein as the "first great American composer", who, "all alone in his Connecticut barn, created his own private musical revolution" - Sony Classical presents the most authoritative recording collection ever released of works by this eccentric, prophetic genius.

The 5-CD box set Charles Ives - The Anniversary Edition is a unique and provocative introduction only released previously 50 years ago on LP by Columbia Masterworks under the art direction of Henrietta Condak to celebrate Ives's centenary.

The first disc examines "The Many Faces of Charles Ives" through eight diverse works recorded between 1964 and 1970: Bernstein conducts the New York Philharmonic in The Fourth of July and The Unanswered Question; General William Booth Enters into Heaven, one of Ives's towering achievements, and The Circus Band are performed by the Gregg Smith Singers; baritone Thomas Stewart sings the moving song In Flanders Fields; organist E. Power Biggs plays Ives's Variations on "America"; composer Gunther Schuller conducts The Pond for chamber orchestra; and the Largo cantabile Hymn is performed by the New York String Quartet and double bass player Alvin Brehm. CD 2, "The Celestial Country", offers Ives's early cantata by that name, composed in 1897-99 for his conservative Yale composition teacher Horatio Parker. It is sung by the Gregg Smith Singers (accompanied by the Columbia Chamber Orchestra), who also perform arrangements of four of Ives's most powerful patriotic songs with the American Symphony Orchestra and Leopold Stokowski conducting. "The Things Our Fathers Loved", CD 3, contains 25 of Ives's songs, delivered by the soprano Helen Boatwright, who specialized in American song. She is partnered by John Kirkpatrick, who studied and worked closely with Ives and is still regarded as the most authoritative interpreter of his piano music. Gramophone in 1974 praised this famous recording as "the finest selection ever to appear" on LP of "what may well turn out to be considered his most important, characteristic and consistently inspired body of music."

Classical Music

Classical Music

The Concord Sonata by Charles Ives is without doubt the most iconic American piano sonata. Its epic length (appr. 50 minutes), its extreme technical difficulties and its highly unusual form and writing make it one of the greatest challenges for any performing pianist. Any new recording of it is an event. The sonata’s 4 movements represent figures associated with the Transcendentalism movement: Ralph Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Bronson and Louisa Alcott and Henry David Thoreau. The piece demonstrates Ives' experimental tendencies: much of it is written without barlines, the harmonies are advanced, and in the second movement there is a cluster chord created by depressing the piano's keys with a piece of wood. The piece also amply demonstrates Ives' fondness for musical quotation (especially Beethoven’s 5th). Pianist Thomas Hell is widely recognised as a specialist of 20th century piano repertoire. He recorded works by Carter, Schoenberg, Dallapiccola, Boulez and the complete Etudes by Ligeti. “A clear frontrunner.” - Classicstoday.com

Charles Ives’ Concord Sonata, the work to which this album is devoted, is as diversified and idiosyncratic as the composer himself. The piece has four movements, each based on an American writer of the 19th century. All writers which inspired Ives had a close relationship with Concord, Massachusetts. Pianist Tzimon Barto provides a brilliant interpretation full of sensitivity and impressive virtuosity to this work.

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

This production received the quarterly German Record Critics' Award! Herbert Henck: piano.

In addition to his two piano sonatas, the most extensive compositions among his works, Ives wrote a series of shorter piano pieces of which those that have been published are collected on this recording. United in such a manner, they present a kind of cross-section of Ives' compositional output setting in relief at the same time several characteristics of his music. Marches, chorales, ragtimes, waltzes, popular American songs, classical quotations, sounds that recede and sounds that approach from the distance, thickly woven contrapuntal movements, seriousness, wit and high spirits, melancholy, pathos and irony, they all find themselves in an often colourful, inimitable mixture, often in the same piece, often in provoking juxtaposition. Cross-connections between the individual pieces as well as between them and others of his works are portraits, as obvious as they are characteristic, of a compositional technique that as strongly resisted the exclusion of any kind of musical materials as it was effortlessly able to integrate them. Such an approach to traditional styles and subjects, formal construction, playing techniques, form types, tuning systems, or conventions of performance, incorporating these materials to the point of disintegration, sometimes in abrupt confrontation, gives his music character and stature, and identifies Ives as one of the truly experimental composers of our century whose ideas have since been carried on in an even broader and more radical sense by John Cage. This production received the quarterly German Record Critics' Award.

Classical Music

Ives was and remains a great musical pioneer, and as such open to misunderstanding, but the first two of his symphonies hold onto conventional sonorities from the rich European legacy of the past. … These are both works with their origins in Ives’s student years, the First Symphony taking clear cues from great predecessors such as Dvo?ák, and with the flavour of Brahms and others. If you know your Nielsen symphonies you could almost swear that little descending A F# E theme in the Second Symphony might have leaked across to Denmark, and though this is as good as impossible it may give some idea of the character to be found here.

As I hear it, Sir Andrew Davis’s interpretations take that authentic approach, removing the wilder later works from the picture and approaching these scores as serious attempts to create grand personal statements based on the musical influences to hand at the turn of the century and, in the case of the First Symphony, being tamed by the conventions held as gospel by Ives’s teacher Horatio Parker. Parker both restrained the harmonic excesses of his student while at the same time introducing him to the greats of the Germanic tradition. Davis is sensitive to this, and you can hear Brahms in the shaping of the string notes of the melodic lines in the Second Symphony in particular. Ives’s grafting of American tunes onto his Romantic symphonic model has little effect in releasing the work from its historic constraints. Ives wasn’t writing for laughs, and ‘hamming-up’ the naïve strangeness and unusual confluence in either of these symphonies doesn’t help their cause. A side-effect of seeking refinement is indeed a loss of boisterous energy, but is that what Ives would have been after at this point?

Unencumbered by controversy and artificially introduced passions but filled with atmospheric expression and full of clarity in their adherence to the letter of these scores, I really quite like these performances, and look forward to what Sir Andrew Davis does with the later symphonies. That twinkle in his eye tells me this series might be starting out as something of a sleeper and, as with Ives himself, the best is yet to come.

– Dominy Clements, MusicWeb International

Concord, Massachusetts is an American city that in the nineteenth century was a haven for thinkers and activists who focused on the trend of transcendentalism representing values such as equality, independence and self-reliance. The ideas of transcendentalists was inherent in Charles Ives works. His 4-part Piano Sonata II Concord, Mass. 1840-1860 is devoted to "four wise people" associated with Concord - important representatives of this trend. During Ives's life the Sonata was considered almost impossible to perform, and as a result was rarely recorded. It was eventually recorded in Poland for the first time. This task was undertaken by pianist Daniel Brylewski, laureate of international contests for contemporary music, specializing in the 20th and 21st century repertoire. The present release presents that recording.

Concord, Mass., 1840-1860, this is the subtitle of Charles Ives's second piano sonata. It refers to the town of Concord in the American state of Massachusetts and to the years in which Concord was the focal point of an intellectual movement commonly called "Transcendentalism", which continues to influence the spiritual life of America even today: In the battle against the dominance of Rationalism and Empiricism, Transcendentalism, with it's mystical and philosophical characteristics as well as it's social criticism, emphasized the self-reliance of the individual. Charles Ives was familiar from childhood on with the teachings and literature of the Transcendentalists, shared many of their ideas, and sought to realize them as a businessman and composer in his public as well as private life. Artistically, politically, morally, and philosophically, these ideas represented his intellectual home; all his life, musically and in his literary essays, he dealt with the legacy of Transcendentalism. This is why he named the four movements of his 'Concord Sonata' after famous persons from the circle of the Transcendentalists: "The whole is an attempt to present (one person�s) impression of the spirit of transcendentalism. This is undertaken in impressionistic pictures of [Ralph Waldo] Emerson and [Henry David] Thoreau, a sketch of the [Bronson Amos] Alcotts, and a scherzo supposed to reflect a lighter quality which is often found in the fantastic side of [Nathaniel] Hawthorne." (Charles Ives)