Search - Ives, Donald Berman :: Unknown Ives

I can't get this out of my CD drawer

Richard B. Downing | hudson, Florida USA | 03/24/2001

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Let me say straight off that I come from a background of late Coltrane, Ayler, Cecil Taylor, Ellery Eskelin, and the Gold Sparkle Band -- if any of these jazz folks interest you, than you may find you need Donald Berman's interpretation of Ives. I do not profess to be an expert on Ives' works, although I have a number of them. But this CD just will not leave my player. I enjoy the focus on just Berman's piano sans orchestra. The melody/dissonance that is Ives seems, to me, to be even more pronouced, more thrilling. I do play the numbered symphonies, but Berman's disc is the one I always want to hear. So if you enjoy some of the jazz artists I enjoy, you may want to move in Berman's direction just to see what happens. If you find you're as attracted as I am to his disc, write me and tell me why. Then we'll both know. And we'll both be buying spare copies."

Ives will always remain "unknown" his music implies this

scarecrow | Chicago, Illinois United States | 10/24/2003

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Charles Ives will always remain "unknown" within the dimensions in art that suggests something beyond itself,beyond the imaginary,the transcendental yet concrete in the enormous influence of his music. These piano solo works are like a timbral history certainly for Americana, his musical language seems to have pre-dated the century-to-come in his innovations and experimental demeanor, with atonality(his own),cluster chords (Concord Sonata,and Anti-Abolitionists Riots),neo-romanticism(First Sonata,First,Second,Third Symphonies),Piano Solo Studies, recent music history the modern "Study" has become a vibrant endless genre (See Ligeti, Fedele, Abbinanti,Rorem,Cage,Bolcom,Wolff)Also Quarter-Tone works, and he had a percussion quartet that was never completed.This is marvelous playing inspired by Mr. Berman. The "Three-Page Sonata" its elegant structure is well-thought through with great sensitivity to the works interpretive nuances,simply allowing the "magical" timbres to work themselves, as the "floating" pedal-point-like middle section of this work surrounded by atonal disquiet. These various Studies are all well played with a great detail of spirit. It's odd but usually Europeans as pianist Herbert Henck for instance haven't heard the ragtimes,hymn-tunes, Folk and Pop Songs inside Ives' textures, so frequently the "spirit" is missing. Berman however understands the import of the Ttnes,that it is there to serve Ives's penchant for collecting the lifeworld within his music. Sometimes this musical welter/assemblage can overspend itself, or accrete beyond the works borders as in "Study No.20" where it seems everything is here almost similar to Joyce's Finnagan's Wake""everybody comes. . . " "Alexander" the ragtime tune is heard,along with great violence, cluster chords as accompanimental figues, and Ives's great atonal declamations.In the early Fifties Pierre Boulez was brought around New York City by Morton Feldman, and Ives was the subject, Boulez had referred to Ives excesses as conceptual "mud", meaning there is a threshold point where no one can decipher the musical threads in Ives.To a large degree Boulez was right technically, however, if Ives had "edited" this "mud"he would have lost his spirtual conviction, something Boulez would perhaps find extraneous to the practicing artist.Well piano"studies" are suppose to function as a conceptual assemblage, a catalogue of timbre. I don't think Ives knew Debussy's fascinating set, but perhaps he did know Chopin's more concert-performative extroverted ones.But there is much in these Ives piano "Studies" that is extraneous,predictable,unfinished, and redundant, yet deeply interesting and compelling in what they contribute to the timbral history of the piano, and ones perception of music, its frame and structural dimensions. Although Ives was no great structural innovator. He adopted traditional genre as a strength,latering its insides for contemplation. Certainly the piano music of Carter, Geo.Flynn, and Christian Wolff owes a debt to Ives here. The "Set of Five Take-Offs" are also fascinating.A collection under one-leaf of stylistic small-scale differences,much like the genre of the "Piano Album" a genre quite vibrant within middle class Europe,the latter 19th Century, which found its way to the Eastern USA middle class. Every home had a piano.One of the five here is "Song Without Good Words" an obvious reference to Mendelssohn's great set, but in Ives it is more a reflection a contamination(through atonality) of the simple melodic gestures.This actually is remiiscent of Mahler. There really is no direct melody here only fragments,gestures of music already written.Ives merely furnishes an afterthought, a postmodernist as well here. Ives then simply adds disquiet reflection.Additionally the Ruggles miniatures, the "Evocations" are simply an incredible contribution of music on these shores, Americana. Ruggles' music as well seems to have pre-dated much of the violent 20th Century with his massive orchestral tone poems "Sun-Treader",and more elegant refined quiet"Angels" for muted brass. He himself had lived in many parts of the USA Minnesota,Florida,New York. And again Berman reveals his sensitivity to these introspective lifeworlds of Ruggles,the first "chant" exhibits the sustained timbre leading to violence of unencumbered rawly exposed dissonance minor ninths, and major sevenths,timbres we find today quite tame.Ruggles was a cranky arrogant,opinionated and visually disheveled-like man, and he had worked on these piano "chants" literally all his life with a frequently rented spinet piano, out-of-tune with the typical thin cheap sound, (so eyewitnesses tell.)"

"Unknown" Ives? Not quite, but indispensable nonetheless

Discophage | France | 05/16/2007

(4 out of 5 stars)

"According to the liner notes by pianist Donald Berman himself, all the compositions contained on this disc originate in a book of bound manuscripts given by Ives to John Kirpatrick in 1938. Kirpatrick is the famous early Ivesian friend, champion and scholar who premiered the composer's mammoth Concord Sonata as early as 1939, and spent the rest of his life tackling the Sisyphus task of painstakingly editing and publishing Ives' works - a shambles of jumbled manuscripts, scraps and bits never meant to be "final". No wonder then if Kirpatrick, having first concentrated on the big works, didn't approach editing the book of shorter pieces until the 70s and 80s. In the meanwhile, Henry Cowell had published three of them (in 1949), which are consequently more often played and recorded: the "Three-Page Sonata", "The Anti-Abolitionist Riots in the 1830s and 1840s" and "Some Southpaw Pitching". Later, working directly from the manuscripts, Alan Mandel played and recorded Ives' near complete output for piano for Desto in 1967 (reissued on CD as a Vox Box titled "Charles Ives: Works For Piano"), a recording unfortunately marred by serious sonic flaws. Additionaly, what Berman plays here are newer editions, in part Kirpatrick's and in part his own (the "Three-Page Sonata", for instance, has repeats and cuts that do not make it exactly comparable to the other recordings, though the gist of the music is there).



Indeed Berman was one of Kirpatrick's preferred students, so much so that, in 1989, two years before his death, he handed out the book to Berman, suggesting that he complete the editing job. Among the pieces played here, some were edited solely by Berman "proceeding from the work initiated by Alan Mandel in the 60s", some by Kirpatrick with occasional changes and revisions by Berman, and some result in a joint effort of both. So what we have here is a direct line from the composer to the performer.



Ives had numbered the pieces contained in the book with the idea of adding up to 27 works, presumably intending them to form a cycle mirroring Chopin's 27 etudes, though there were gaps in Ives' collection. Though the notes are not entirely clear on this, not all the existing pieces from the book are played on the disc: the rest, except for # 27 "Chromâtimelôdie" written for piano and brass, is on The Unknown Ives, Volume 2. Anyway, the collection presents "a variety of styles and musical experiences in the vein of a diary of experiences written over time".



As Berman further writes, "the Studies and other short works for piano can be considered some of Ives' most abstruse and difficult music". Indeed, it is Ives at his most demanding and uncompromising, adept of the clash and crash, replete with multilayered accumulation of sound to the point of rambunctious near-cacophony, crashing chords and clusters, dissonant counterpoint, twelve-tone rows (study 22), conflicting tonalities, polyrhythms sometimes so complex that they foreshadow Conlon Nancarrow's studies for player piano, thus placing daunting demands upon the human performer. But there are also moments of hauntingly hazy dreaminess (as in studies 6 and 7, or the middle movement of the "Three-page sonata, with its reminiscence of the Westminster Chimes). The fascinating thing with Ives is how much his music is steeped into both the Western, German Romantic tradition (by way of his teacher at Yale Horatio Parker) as well as in the trite American vernacular of Church hymns and popular songs, while at the same time saucily eager to dynamite these traditions from the inside with a no-holds-barred enthusiasm. In comparison, Carl Ruggles' stark and rugged Four Evocations - an appropriate coupling, considering its shared approach to dissonant counterpoint and the personal ties between both composers - seem almost tame.



The music is so rich and complex as to warrant a diversity of approaches (besides the three Cowell-edited pieces, the Studies have been recorded here and there by others than Alan Mandel, most notably by Dona Coleman as complements to her recordings of the two Sonatas for Etcetera: Piano Sonata/Studies/Varied Air & Variations and Ives: Sonata for piano No2; Three-Page sonata). Berman is up to the music's power and complex poly-rhythms, with always fine control and clarity of articulation (more than Coleman, for instance), but he tends to favor moderate tempos, going for the massive at the expense of the frenetic (as in the first and last movements of the Three Page Sonata or the 16th-note chromatic runs in Study 22). For the hectic frenzy that is so integral to the spirit of this music, go to Coleman, or Feinberg in study 20 (The American Innovator). On the other hand, in "Some Southpaw Pitching" (Study 21), he misses the point of the acceleration and deceleration process that Ives has embedded in the music (and which Roger Shields on Piano Music In America 1900-1945 and Alan Mandel do capture), because he launches in too fast, too soon. The same is true of the acceleration at the end of "Rough & Ready" (the second of the Five Take-Offs) which Berman takes slower rather than faster as Ives instructs.



Still, considering the coherence, interest and relative rarity of the program, the amount of scholarly work involved and the superiority of the recording over Mandel's poor sonics, this is an essential contribution to our knowledge of Charles Ives and an indispensable disc, belonging to every serious Ives collection.

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