Charles Ives - Concord Sonata; Songs (Pierre-Laurent Aimard; Susan Graham)

Information

Composer: Charles Ives

• (01-17) Songs
• (18-21) Piano Sonata No. 2, "Concord, Mass., 1840-60"

Susan Graham, soprano
Pierre-Laurent Aimard, piano
Tabea Zimmermann, viola (18)
Emmanuel Pahud, flute (21)

Date: 2004
Label: Warner Classics

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Review

A splendid addition to the Ives discography and a fine tribute 50 years after his death from two superlative musicians

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.

-- Edward Seckerson, Gramophone

More reviews:
ClassicsToday  ARTISTIC QUALITY: 9 / SOUND QUALITY: 9
BBC Music Magazine  PERFORMANCE: ***** / SOUND: *****
http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/reviews/c4bd/
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2004/may/07/classicalmusicandopera.shopping1
https://www.allmusic.com/album/ives-concord-sonata-songs-mw0001848039
https://www.amazon.com/Ives-Concord-Sonata-Songs-Charles/dp/B0001HZ6MO

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Charles Ives (October 20, 1874 – May 19, 1954) was an American composer. He is one of the first American composers of international renown.and regarded as an "American original", though his music was largely ignored during his life. He combined the American popular and church-music traditions of his youth with European art music, and was among the first composers to engage in a systematic program of experimental music, with musical techniques including polytonality, polyrhythm, tone clusters, aleatoric elements, and quarter tones, foreshadowing many musical innovations of the 20th century.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Ives

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Pierre-Laurent Aimard (born 9 September 1957 in Lyon) is a French pianist. Aimard studied with Yvonne Loriod and with Maria Curcio, and was awarded the chamber music prize of the Paris Conservatoire in 1973. Aimard is particularly committed to contemporary music. He was the soloist in several premieres of works such as Répons by Pierre Boulez and Klavierstück XIV by Karlheinz Stockhausen. In addition to his work with contemporary music, Aimard has recorded the five Beethoven piano concertos. Aimard has recorded for the Sony Classical, Teldec, Deutsche Grammophon and Pentatone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre-Laurent_Aimard
http://pierrelaurentaimard.com/

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Susan Graham (born July 23, 1960, Roswell, New Mexico) is an American mezzo-soprano. She studied the piano for 13 years and is a graduate of Texas Tech University and the Manhattan School of Music. Her operatic roles include ones by Berlioz, Handel and Mozart. She has also premièred several roles in contemporary operas. Graham is a noted champion of the French song repertoire and of songs by contemporary American composers. She received multiple rewards for her recordings, such as Best Classical Vocal Performance Grammy 2005 for her Ives' Songs album. She is a US delegate for UNESCO.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Graham

http://susangraham.com/

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