Concord

Album review

Phillip Bush is better known as a collaborative pianist than as a soloist. He has played ensemble works of Ives, which, as he points out in an elegant booklet note, greatly outnumber the composer's solo works. It may be that after the Piano Sonata No. 2 ("Concord, Mass."), the composer felt he had nothing more to say in the piano solo medium, and performers have long struggled with this vast and complex work. Bush writes that he has been fascinated with it since his youth, and his performance here reflects long study. He points out that for all its modernist experimentalism, the "Concord" Sonata is Romantic at heart in its literary inspiration, its programmatic passages, and above all, its virtuosity. The latter leads some pianists, including apparently Ives himself, to push the musical text to the limits, but Bush's reading is several minutes slower than average (although not as slow as the one-hour-plus readings of Marc-André Hamelin, whom one might have expected to storm the ramparts with it). His "Alcotts" movement aims more at transcendence than domesticity, and his outer movements take time to examine small details without losing the sense of a longer line. Bush properly includes the flute in the final movement, played by Jennifer Parker-Harley; this is essential to the music's quality of spilling over its own boundaries. Another draw is the inclusion of the Six Preludes for piano, Op. 15, of Marion Bauer, an American composer whom the revival of works by women has largely missed. Written in the early '20s, the pieces carry the excitement of Americans' discovery of the contemporary European scene, with a bit of Scriabin and a bit of the ragtime-y Debussy. Released on the small Neuma label, this album is a significant entry in the Ives discography. Physical CD buyers will find an interesting detail in the packaging.
© James Manheim /TiVo