For those unaware, celebrating the sesquicentenary of Charles Ives’ birth, New England-based pianist and Ives scholar nonpareil Donald Berman releases a recording of the composer’s Concord Sonata using his own newly prepared edition which reveals fresh insights into the iconic work.

Berman’s immersion into Ives’ sound world began under the tutelage of pianist John Kirkpatrick who gave the New York premiere of the Concord Sonata in 1939. Throughout many years of study and reflection, Berman discovered numerous notes and alterations that Ives made within the Concord’s manuscript pages, each one a step toward realizing his vision for a three-dimensional auditory experience.

Berman concluded that the first movement of the Concord, as Ives imagined it, is quite different than today’s commonly accepted version; his new edition includes two pages worth of material, masterfully recorded here for the first time.

The album opens with the elegiac The St. Gaudens (Black March), referring to the eponymous sculpture in the Boston Common that depicts the Massachusetts 54th, the first Union army regiment of African American soldiers, that is known widely in its orchestral version as the first movement of Ives’ Three Places in New England.

1. Ives: The St Gaudens (Black March) 2. Ives: Piano Sonata No. 2, Concord, Mass., 1840-1860: I. Emerson 3. Piano Sonata No. 2, Concord, Mass., 1840-1860: II. Hawthorne 4. Piano Sonata No. 2, Concord, Mass., 1840-1860: III. The Alcotts 5. Piano Sonata No. 2, Concord, Mass., 1840-1860: IV. Thoreau

This dutifully crafted, magnificently impassioned new recording opens on the stoically languishing Ives: The St Gaudens (Black March) and then we get the jaggedly jaunty Ives: Piano Sonata No. 2, Concord, Mass., 1840-1860: I. Emerson, the flourishingly sprightly Hawthorne, the recording rounding out of the strident The Alcotts, closing on the flirtatiously-manicured Thoreau.

www.donaldbermanpiano.com

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