It might seem anomalous for Los Angeles’ new-music-focused keyboard series, Piano Spheres, to launch its 2024–2025 season with an anniversary. Yet the subject of pianist Stephen Drury’s recital on Tuesday, Oct. 22, at the Colburn School’s Thayer Hall was the 150th birthday of Charles Ives, the visionary American composer whose music was not only ahead of its time but rooted in its own complex definition of time. This captivating and challenging program of Ives’s complete piano sonatas suggested that this music somehow remains perpetually new.
Drury, who’s worked with modernist masters like György Ligeti, Frederic Rzewski, John Cage, and John Zorn (who is Ivesian at heart), inevitably showcased Ives’s landmark “Concord” Sonata (the Piano Sonata No. 2, Concord, Mass., 1840–60). The concert also included the rarely heard Piano Sonata No. 1 and shorter pieces serving as interludes.
The First Sonata occupies a special place in the Ives ouevre as a reverie and remembrance of the composer’s youth. Rich with hymns (such as “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” and “Bringing in the Sheaves”) and wryly rigged ragtime, the piece was written between 1901 and 1909. Its five movements contain early seeds of modernism, with experiments in dissonant writing mixed through with Ives’s sense of nostalgia.
Through it all hovers a certain aching tenderness. The hymn material seems to both embrace the sentimental and spiritual and inject skeptic jolts of dissonance and decontextualization. Drury masterfully navigated the challenging score, with its radical contrasts of dynamics and tonality versus atonality.
As a special entr’acte, Drury performed Ives’s quirky, jewellike Three Page Sonata from 1905 (published in 1949), which the pianist rightly described as “a jab in the ribs of traditional sonata form.” As with much of Ives’s music, a teasing proximity to musical normalcy detours into rebellious impulses, making for a lively stylistic debate.
Leapfrogging to the present, the recital also showcased brook line(s), a world premiere by Paul Beaudoin, written as part of Piano Spheres’ ambitious “30 for 30” commissioning project this season. Rather than wax Ivesian in his piece, Beaudoin summons up a meditative and minimalist ambience, a coolheaded response to aspects of the “Concord” Sonata’s “Hawthorne” movement.
Ives’ sesquicentennial has encouraged more attention to this still-underperformed master. Drury lent some context to the Second Sonata, a tribute to American Transcendentalist thinkers and writers, whose characters are evoked in four movements. From the ponderous, pondering opening of “Emerson” to the final querulous chord and four ghost notes closing the sonata, the pianist brought the requisite focus, fidelity, and reckless abandon, especially in the somewhat psychedelic “Hawthorne.”
In the misty and mystical finale, “Thoreau,” Drury brought a wary introspection to this movement whose margins seem to be lined with unanswered questions. And Ives makes much of margins, a point duly delivered in this memorable recital.
