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Donald Berman Plays Ives' Concord Sonata · The Piano Maven with Jed Distler

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  This is Jed Dissler and welcome to the Piano Maven, your friendly podcast guide to piano
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  recordings.
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  There have been numerous concerts and celebrations and recording projects to mark the 150th anniversary
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  of American composer Charles Ive's birth in 1874.
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  I'll never forget hearing his music for the first time when I was around 12 years old.
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  I was at music camp and one of our counselors played a recording of the last movement of
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  Ive's Second Symphony.
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  I remember I just went bananas over the mixture of sheer cacophony and chaos and all of those
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  American patriotic tunes and marches popping out of the texture.
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  It was so wild and so elemental to my mind.
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  Yet also the music conveyed so much humor to me.
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  And I don't think I had heard music with such a sense of humor outside of Bugs Bunny cartoons.
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  Clearly I had not yet been exposed to a great deal of Haydn as an adolescent.
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  Otherwise I would have said, yeah, I know a funny composer, Haydn.
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  But Ives could be funny too.
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  And I felt a similar joy and exhilaration in my first year at college when the Ive Centenary
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  came around.
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  That was 1974.
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  You see, I'm giving my age away.
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  I imprinted on Ive's piano music through Alan Mandel's recordings of the more or less complete
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  piano works issued on the Desto label on four LPs.
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  These had the worst LP surfaces ever.
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  They defined snap, crackle, and pop.
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  Later they came out on CD on the Vox label and you didn't have the snap, crackle, and
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  pop.
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  And then later on I learned how John Kirkpatrick, who was still very much alive and active in
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  the 1970s, how he was the pianist who had given the second piano sonata, the Concord
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  sonata, its world premiere.
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  So naturally I had to check out his stereo recording on Columbia Masterworks, which was
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  in our college library.
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  It's absolutely terrific, by the way, and it's on CD.
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  His premiere recording for Columbia issued on 78s, I think around 1945, is also terrific
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  and that was reissued very early on in the LP era, but it's never been digitized so
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  far as I know.
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  The Concord sonata's four movements were named after four of New England's leading writers
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  and intellectuals, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Bronson Alcott, who was a minister
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  and the father of the writer Louisa May Alcott.
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  And lastly, Henry David Thoreau.
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  This is music that goes between the most touching lyricism and repose and the most combative
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  curmudgeonly piano writing of its time, or of any time for that matter.
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  Ive's had the sonata published twice, the first time in 1919 and then again in 1947.
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  The 1947 edition had many revisions, largely making consonant passages more dissonant.
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  And even after the 1947 score was published, Ive's kept adding things to the mix, most
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  extensively in the opening Emerson movement.
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  I'm not going to go into extensive detail about the various editions and Ive's composing
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  process because that's a topic that's much better served by musicologists and program
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  note writers.
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  But I do want to talk about the pianist Donald Berman's new recording of the Concord Sonata,
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  released this year on the Avi label.
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  Don played an amazing performance of the Concord in concert without an audience.
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  It was filmed during COVID and I was really impressed, not just by his meticulous attention
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  to detail and pure unbridled energy, but also by the fact that Don was playing by memory.
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  I mean, who plays the Concord Sonata from memory?
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  I think there have been a few brave souls out there who've done so.
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  Now Donald Berman studied with John Kirkpatrick, who was a mentor of his, and Donald basically
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  inherited the mantle from Kirkpatrick as the Ive's piano music's keeper of the flames,
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  so to speak.
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  Whereas John Kirkpatrick decided that Ive's first thoughts on the Concord should be adhered
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  to instead of the revisions, and that's reflected in his 1968 recording that I mentioned earlier,
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  Donald Berman actually holds the opposite view.
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  He feels that Ive's final thoughts are what one should consider.
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  And Donald's recording of the Concord does incorporate all of the changes explicitly
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  or implicitly indicated by Ive's.
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  And in the final throw movement, Donald forgoes the option to have a flute join in at the
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  end, and he actually plays that optional added flute line on the piano.
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  Most pianists haven't done that, but Donald does, and it just works wonderfully well.
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  But what I love about Donald Berman's playing of the Concord Sonata is that how he builds
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  the textures from the ground up.
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  I say that a lot when I talk about Brahms music, but there is a kind of Brahmsian cast
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  to much of the piano writing.
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  But what I mean is that Don pays close attention to voice leading, and he really pays attention
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  to how the bass lines move.
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  Although Ive's can shift his tempos around in a seemingly arbitrary manner, Don figures
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  out a way to address that feeling of improvisation and spontaneity by making intelligent and
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  sensible modifications in order to clarify the shape of a theme or to build a climax
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  toward its logical or illogical conclusion.
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  And I also like in this performance how the normally lyrical and tuneful Alcott's movement
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  comes off with much more of an edge than usual.
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  It's less rounded off or Chopin-ized perhaps, certainly not sentimental or mawkish at all
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  in Donald Berman's hands.
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  Donald proceeds his performance of the Concord Sonata with a marvelous and quite gripping
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  curtain raiser.
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  It's a piece called The St. Gaudens, which is subtitled Black March.
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  Everything about this disc is really ideal.
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  The production values are wonderful, from Adem Abe's house's engineering to Donald
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  Berman's extensive and scholarly and really insightful annotations.
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  As I often say on these podcasts, I would not want to be without X recording of Y work,
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  and I'm not going to give up my Concord Sonata recordings of John Kirkpatrick or Stephen
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  Mayer or Jeremy Dank or both of Marc-Andre Hamelin's versions.
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  I actually wrote the booklet notes for Marc's Hyperion remake of the Concord, and I still
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  love that Alan Mandel recording that I spoke about earlier.
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  There's also a fabulous version from the early 1960s of the Concord featuring the German
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  pianist Alois Kontarski.
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  Also Pierre-Laurent Amarde played the Concord excellently too.
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  We're really spoiled for choice when it comes to the Concord on disc.
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  However, for its sheer authority in terms of pianism and music making, as well as presenting
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  the revised version of the Concord in more or less idealized manifestation, Donald Berman's
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  Y's Concord Sonata easily belongs in this work's top tier of recordings.
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  This is Jed Dissler, and you've been listening to the Piano Maven, your friendly podcast
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  guide to piano recordings.
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  So thank you for tuning in, and please spread the good word about this podcast.
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  I look forward to being together with you for the next episode.