Performances of Charles Ives’s monumental Concord Sonata may no longer be the extreme rarities they used to be, but they are still infrequent enough to make each a special event. Pianists with the technique and perspicacity to take on the challenge of finding their way through the thickets and tangles of notes are rare creatures too, but that is exactly the kind of challenge that Marc-André Hamelin relishes. He devoted the first part of his Wigmore Hall recital to Ives’s three-quarter-hour work, and a capacity audience was enthralled from first note to last.
It’s sometimes forgotten that the four movements are character pieces, and that the reference to the Massachusetts town of Concord in the title, and Ives’s labelling of the movements after leading writers of the New England school of transcendentalism, aren’t merely cosmetic. This is music with a tough philosophical core, whether in the search for a clear path in Emerson, the opening movement, the more picaresque diversions of Hawthorne, the domestic calm of The Alcotts or the swirling ruminations of Thoreau. Hamelin’s performance conveyed those different characters with wonderful vividness, taking the music’s extreme technical difficulty, with its fistfuls of notes and disorienting changes of direction, entirely in his stride, and finding beauty in the most tangled moments. It was a remarkable achievement.
After such a strenuous workout Hamelin would have been forgiven for allowing himself some less demanding pieces in the second half of his programme. But he ended with Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit, as challenging as the Ives but in an entirely different way. His performance certainly had the requisite sweep and brilliance, through the surging climaxes of the opening Ondine, the insistent tolling of Le Gibet, and the snap and crackle of the final Scarbo. But there seemed to be a dimension missing; the range of keyboard colour that the piano writing exploits seemed rather muted, just as the element of fantasy and sheer playfulness had been played down in the miniatures of Schumann’s Waldszenen before it. Where the Ives had been very special indeed, the performances of these works seemed just a little bit ordinary.