Ives Songs; Concord Sonata
A splendid addition to the Ives discography and a fine tribute 50 years after his death from two superlative musicians
View record and artist detailsRecord and Artist Details
Composer or Director: Charles Ives
Genre:
Vocal
Label: Warner Classics
Magazine Review Date: 6/2004
Media Format: CD or Download
Media Runtime: 79
Mastering:
Stereo
DDD
Catalogue Number: 2564 60297-2

Tracks:
Composition | Artist Credit |
---|---|
Sonata for Piano No. 2, 'Concord, Mass.: 1840-60' |
Charles Ives, Composer
Charles Ives, Composer Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Piano |
(The) Things our fathers loved |
Charles Ives, Composer
Charles Ives, Composer Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Piano Susan Graham, Soprano |
(The) Housatonic at Stockbridge |
Charles Ives, Composer
Charles Ives, Composer Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Piano Susan Graham, Soprano |
Swimmers |
Charles Ives, Composer
Charles Ives, Composer Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Piano Susan Graham, Soprano |
Memories |
Charles Ives, Composer
Charles Ives, Composer Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Piano Susan Graham, Soprano |
Ann Street |
Charles Ives, Composer
Charles Ives, Composer Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Piano Susan Graham, Soprano |
Serenity |
Charles Ives, Composer
Charles Ives, Composer Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Piano Susan Graham, Soprano |
1,2,3 |
Charles Ives, Composer
Charles Ives, Composer Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Piano Susan Graham, Soprano |
Songs my mother taught me |
Charles Ives, Composer
Charles Ives, Composer Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Piano Susan Graham, Soprano |
(The) Circus Band |
Charles Ives, Composer
Charles Ives, Composer Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Piano Susan Graham, Soprano |
(The) Cage |
Charles Ives, Composer
Charles Ives, Composer Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Piano Susan Graham, Soprano |
(The) Indians |
Charles Ives, Composer
Charles Ives, Composer Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Piano Susan Graham, Soprano |
Like a sick eagle |
Charles Ives, Composer
Charles Ives, Composer Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Piano Susan Graham, Soprano |
September |
Charles Ives, Composer
Charles Ives, Composer Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Piano Susan Graham, Soprano |
(A) Farewell to land |
Charles Ives, Composer
Charles Ives, Composer Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Piano Susan Graham, Soprano |
Thoreau |
Charles Ives, Composer
Charles Ives, Composer Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Piano Susan Graham, Soprano |
Soliloquy |
Charles Ives, Composer
Charles Ives, Composer Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Piano Susan Graham, Soprano |
(A) Sound of distant horn |
Charles Ives, Composer
Charles Ives, Composer Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Piano Susan Graham, Soprano |
Author: Edward Seckerson
Charles Ives to complaining pianist: ‘Is it the composer’s fault that man has only 10 fingers?’ Listening to Pierre-Laurent Aimard play the Concord Sonata it’s not Ives’s dry wit but the assertion that man has only 10 fingers that you begin to question. Nothing Ives wrote was ‘reasonable’ as in playable, singable. Everything was a stretch, a note or chord or counterpoint too far. Technically optimistic, spiritually aspirational. In a sense Aimard is almost too good, the realisation of everything Ives was striving for in this piece. You can almost hear Ives thinking: ‘OK, if that’s possible, let’s go somewhere else…’
Actually, the Concord Sonata goes wherever you want it to go. Its starting point is American literature – Emerson, Hawthorne, the Alcotts and Thoreau – but its substance is in ideas. Ives the transcendentalist: beyond the American dream. An amazing stream of consciousness. Concord is a town in Massachusetts, it’s where American Independence was bloodily born; but it’s also a word for harmony and for Ives there is harmony in extreme diversity. The big moments in the sonata are all born out of flux. Ideas and notes boil over in the second movement, ‘Hawthorne’, but at its heart is the basic conflict between the earthly body and its free spirit. The body resists, the spirit meditates. There are moments here where you’d swear two pianists were involved. You’d also swear that the sorrowful song so fleetingly alluded to by solo viola (Tabea Zimmerman) in the first movement or the remnant of solo flute (Emmanuel Pahud) in the last are figments of your imagination.
Ives’s imagination – his rampant theatricality – should have made for great operas. Instead he wrote songs: capsule dramas laid out not in scenes or acts but moments in time. Susan Graham inhabits 17 such moments – nostalgic (‘Songs my mother taught me’), visionary (‘A sound of distant horn’), cryptic (‘Soliloquy’), brutal (‘1, 2, 3’), expectant (‘Thoreau’) – and the feminine and masculine qualities of her voice, to say nothing of her musical sensibility, easily encompass the ‘expectancy and ecstasy’ promised by the song ‘Memories’ – which appropriately enough recalls her (and others like her) as a little girl ‘sitting in the opera house’. Aimard is again a one-man band. Almost literally so in ‘The Circus Band’. When Graham shouts ‘hear the trombones’, you really do.
Actually, the Concord Sonata goes wherever you want it to go. Its starting point is American literature – Emerson, Hawthorne, the Alcotts and Thoreau – but its substance is in ideas. Ives the transcendentalist: beyond the American dream. An amazing stream of consciousness. Concord is a town in Massachusetts, it’s where American Independence was bloodily born; but it’s also a word for harmony and for Ives there is harmony in extreme diversity. The big moments in the sonata are all born out of flux. Ideas and notes boil over in the second movement, ‘Hawthorne’, but at its heart is the basic conflict between the earthly body and its free spirit. The body resists, the spirit meditates. There are moments here where you’d swear two pianists were involved. You’d also swear that the sorrowful song so fleetingly alluded to by solo viola (Tabea Zimmerman) in the first movement or the remnant of solo flute (Emmanuel Pahud) in the last are figments of your imagination.
Ives’s imagination – his rampant theatricality – should have made for great operas. Instead he wrote songs: capsule dramas laid out not in scenes or acts but moments in time. Susan Graham inhabits 17 such moments – nostalgic (‘Songs my mother taught me’), visionary (‘A sound of distant horn’), cryptic (‘Soliloquy’), brutal (‘1, 2, 3’), expectant (‘Thoreau’) – and the feminine and masculine qualities of her voice, to say nothing of her musical sensibility, easily encompass the ‘expectancy and ecstasy’ promised by the song ‘Memories’ – which appropriately enough recalls her (and others like her) as a little girl ‘sitting in the opera house’. Aimard is again a one-man band. Almost literally so in ‘The Circus Band’. When Graham shouts ‘hear the trombones’, you really do.
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