My last encounter with
the Concord Sonata was Aimard’s on Warner
where it was coupled with some of Ives’
songs. The Frenchman certainly took
a more visceral and intensely powerful
approach to it than does the American
pianist Steven Mayer, whose more measured
(50 minute) traversal also brings its
own rewards. In that respect Mayer may
be seen as embodying another approach
to the Ivesian aesthetic, since Marc-André
Hamelin (New World) takes a good eight
minutes off Mayer’s timing, clocking
in at 42 minutes. Should one judge by
the stopwatch that is a reasonable measure
of priorities. But of course the stopwatch
tells only part of the story.
In Mayer’s hands the
craggy romanticism is allowed to unfold
at its own unhurried pace, the colours
are brought out with restrained confidence,
and the Beethoven 5 allusions are, at
this speed, rather more explicit than
is usually the case. He certainly catches
the Scherzo of Hawthorne and
gives the hymn tune Martyn with
simplicity and well-balanced chords
(it’s to reappear later) – as well as
the more tumultuous march tunes. He
makes the allusions to the hymnal and
to Beethoven most palpable in The
Alcotts and finds great poetry and
intimacy in Thoreau. His playing
throughout is finely attuned to the
reflective and to the ideas of transcendence.
He plays the finale solo by the way;
others, such as Hamelin, include the
flute whilst Aimard includes both flute
and viola parts.
Elsewhere we get refinements
of movements from the sonata – in Four
Transcriptions from ‘Emerson’,
No.1 in which he compresses material
from the first movement; the thought
processes are actually even more compelling
than the music.
The Celestial Railroad, also
utilises material from Concord and
does so with phantasmagoric brilliance,
fusing railway rhythms with hymn tunes
and scuppering the piety with swathes
of scampering writing. Much of this
also applies to the tough, fractious
atonalities of the Varied Air and
Variations.
The recording catches
the tumult with clarity – and the playing
carries its own whiff of determination,
and romance. To those for whom the hyper
virtuosic, fastball, linear curve of
Hamelin and Aimard seems too daemonic
Mayer offers a more considered alternative.
The Ivesian tent is a capacious one;
there’s room for Bedouin of all shapes
and sizes.
Jonathan Woolf
see also reviews
by Tony
Haywood and Patrick
Waller
Steven Mayer (piano) 
