One couldn’t imagine two Americans so different as the shaggy, forward-looking Charles Ives and the neat, conservative Edward MacDowell. Yet by juxtaposing the former’s monumental Concord Sonata and the latter’s New England Idyls, pianist Louise Bessette sheds light on these composers’ shared penchant for evoking natural landscapes in sound.

The MacDowell cycle holds particular interest, if only because it receives less attention in concert and on record. Bessette evidently views these pieces as more than mere lightweight charmers; her full-bodied sonority and expansive projection elevate these miniatures from the salon to the stage. There’s an almost Brahmsian cast to the richness Bessette elicits from the harmonic motion and bass lines in the opening ‘An Old Garden’, while her dignified eloquence and simplicity in ‘With Sweet Lavender’ resists sentimentality. While pianists are inclined to bring out the top line of ‘In Deep Woods’, Bessette’s strong left-hand presence and attentive voicings underline the music’s seriousness and substance. Yet the laser-like focus of her articulation in the final piece, ‘The Joy of Autumn’, does not sacrifice scampering lightness.

As for the Ives Concord, Bessette easily holds her own in the face of considerably strong competition. She launches the opening ‘Emerson’ movement assertively and decisively, bringing clarity, shape and direction to every phrase, while still allowing the lyrical moments their due. She liberates the cresting left-hand arpeggios in ‘Hawthorne’ from decades’ worth of encrusted mud. One might argue that she needs to take more time over that famous sequence incorporating a special stick to play the tone clusters, or that her wild, relentless climaxes don’t quite match the energetic momentum that both Jeremy Denk and Marc-André Hamelin generate. Yet Bessette’s characterful alertness and inner-voice awareness hold constant attention. In ‘The Alcotts’, she’s not afraid to play up the petulant outbursts for what they are, in contrast to her appropriately plain-spoken readings of the main theme; in short, she uncovers an underlying disquiet to this movement that few pianists reveal. The evocative and hypnotically sustained interpretation of the final ‘Thoreau’ movement caps a superb account. Enthusiastically recommended. 

 This review originally appeared in the SPRING 2025 issue of International Piano