As the longtime general editor of Charles Ives’s piano works for the Ives Society’s critical edition, it stands to reason that Donald Berman’s interpretations are as textually authentic as they can be. Yet for all his painstaking scholarship, Berman is first and foremost an artist, whose colourful virtuosity and total sympathy for Ives’s aesthetic have always made this repertoire come alive. This was audibly apparent throughout Berman’s two ‘Unknown Ives’ anthologies on the CRI and New World labels (5/05), as well as on the present release centred around the composer’s iconic Concord Sonata.

Ives published the sonata twice: first in 1919 and again in 1947, this time with substantial revisions and additions. For example, certain plain octaves from the 1919 edition became diminished or augmented, adding further dissonant flavour. Even after the 1947 publication, Ives continued to tinker, pinning paper strips from his Four Transcriptions from ‘Emerson’ directly on to pages of a printed copy, and writing extensive annotations to indicate changes. While the 1945 premiere recording by Berman’s mentor John Kirkpatrick incorporated many early revisions, his 1968 stereo remake largely reverted to the original printed score. By contrast, Berman strongly feels that Ives’s final additions best represent the Concord, as reflected in this new recording. A telling example occurs in the first movement, with the addition of rolling rhapsodic portions of the first Emerson transcription. In the second movement, ‘Hawthorne’, hauntingly dissonant bell tones enhance the hushed hymnlike chordal passages. For my taste, though, the fast march-time sequence loses its ironic impact through Ives’s convoluted revisions.

My positive impressions of Berman’s October 2020 livestreamed performance easily apply to his 2022 studio recording, where he manages to be precise and inspired at the same time. Aside from textual matters, Berman’s interpretation reflects Kirkpatrick’s vantage point in certain ways. He builds the thick textures from the ground up, with shapelier attention to bass lines than usual, and a cogent sense of foreground and background. And notwithstanding Ives’s penchant for shifting the tempos in a seemingly improvisatory fashion, Berman makes intelligent decisions in regard to the composer’s indications for pacing.

For example, he doesn’t sing out the lyrical theme at the top of the 1947 score’s page 8 ‘quite fast’ (the one that resembles Vernon Duke’s popular song ‘Autumn in New York’), but he sufficiently slows down for its reiteration with displaced octaves a few bars later. He doesn’t quite match the fervency and sweep that Jeremy Denk and Steven Mayer brought to the exposition of ‘Hawthorne’ but his sense of abandon in the climactic final measures hits home. Although many pianists understandably regard ‘The Alcotts’ as an oasis of respite, Berman’s nervous energy, daring pedalling and forceful projection of the détaché lines are very much in keeping with Ives’s own archival recording (New World). The fourth movement, ‘Thoreau’, communicates both tenderness and virility in Berman’s knowing hands, and he gauges the echo effects to perfection. Indeed, his right-hand voicings in the two final pages evoke the presence of a flute, even though Berman forgoes the solo flute option. Those who miss the flute are directed to Phillip Bush’s excellent recording (Neuma) or Marc-André Hamelin’s second traversal (Hyperion, 11/04). Berman’s gorgeously granitic and majestic reading of The St Gaudens (‘Black March’) makes for a gripping prelude to the Concord, abetted by the concert-hall realism and richness of Adam Abeshouse’s production.