All four of these sonatas are works of Ives’s maturity, so the chance of getting them on a single CD for the first time is a landmark. Every movement is saturated with quotations, fused and confused in Ives’s inimitable fashion. Especially when hymn tunes surface clearly, they form some of the most impressive transcendental experiences in the whole of Ives’s chamber music. There have been previous recordings of all four on LP (all now deleted) – Zukofsky/Kalish (1974); Negyesy/ Cardew (1975); and in 1982 Stepner/Kirkpatrick actually recorded five violin sonatas because the veteran Ives scholar Kirkpatrick controversially created another from sketches.
The 1970s recordings had poor sound but Stepner/Kirkpatrick had the style exactly, and their ruminative New England impressionism was matched by Fulkerson and Shannon in 1991. At a time when fine Ives performances are emerging from artists of all nationalities, there remain some obstacles for European performers in these particular sonatas. The first one is about holidays and hymn-singing in later nineteenth-century New England. (The slow movement is a trap when assessing the recorded balance between the two instruments, since Ives specifies muted violin throughout and there’s a massive crescendo for the piano with the violin perversely submerged.) There’s plenty of syncopation in the two outer movements which don’t quite swing with Schneeberger and Cholette the way they do with Fulkerson and Shannon. Nor does the second movement of Sonata No. 2, ‘In the Barn’, and ‘The Revival’ is not quite soft enough to be mystical.
Schneeberger and Cholette are at their best in the Third Sonata, which is the most Brahmsian. The Fourth Sonata, Children’s Day at the Camp Meeting, is Sunday school music, but the performance is a bit rough for the kids in the first movement. In fact their approach throughout these performances is insufficiently lyrical, although always conscientiously literal. But these tunes were the core of Ives, and his music cherishes them melodically. Some of these points may seem merely details, but they are allied to a slightly harsh recorded sound. However – and this may be the decisive factor – these perfectly presentable readings by Schneeberger and Cholette are on a single CD, whereas Fulkerson’s and Shannon’s more idiomatic transcendental calm has cost them four more minutes and sadly lost them the bargain.'