It may seem unusual for Los Angeles’ new-music-focused keyboard series, Piano Spheres, to kick off its 2024–2025 season with an anniversary celebration. However, pianist Stephen Drury’s recital on Tuesday, Oct. 22, at the Colburn School’s Thayer Hall honored the 150th birthday of Charles Ives, the visionary American composer whose innovative music was not only ahead of its time but also deeply rooted in a complex understanding of time. This captivating and demanding program featured Ives’s complete piano sonatas, suggesting that his music continues to sound perpetually fresh.
Drury, who has collaborated with modernist masters such as György Ligeti, Frederic Rzewski, John Cage, and John Zorn (who shares an Ivesian spirit), naturally included Ives’s landmark “Concord” Sonata (Piano Sonata No. 2, Concord, Mass., 1840–60). The concert also highlighted the rarely performed Piano Sonata No. 1, alongside shorter interludes.
The First Sonata holds a unique position in Ives’s oeuvre, serving as a reverie and a reflection of the composer’s youth. Rich in hymns (including “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” and “Bringing in the Sheaves”) and infused with wry ragtime, this piece was composed between 1901 and 1909. Its five movements contain the early seeds of modernism, blending dissonant experimentation with Ives’s nostalgic sensibility.
Throughout the performance, an undercurrent of aching tenderness resonated. The hymn material manages to embrace both the sentimental and the spiritual while injecting jarring doses of dissonance and decontextualization. Drury skillfully navigated the challenging score, marked by radical contrasts between dynamics, tonality, and atonality.
As a special interlude, Drury performed Ives’s quirky, gem-like Three Page Sonata from 1905 (published in 1949), which the pianist aptly described as “a jab in the ribs of traditional sonata form.” Much of Ives’s music dances along the edge of conventionality, veering into rebellious impulses that spark lively stylistic debates.
Bridging the past and present, the recital also featured brook line(s), a world premiere by Paul Beaudoin, created as part of Piano Spheres’ ambitious “30 for 30” commissioning project this season. Instead of directly evoking Ives, Beaudoin’s piece conjures a meditative, minimalist atmosphere, serving as a cool-headed response to the “Hawthorne” movement of the “Concord” Sonata.
The celebration of Ives’s sesquicentennial has spurred increased attention to this still-underperformed master. Drury provided context for the Second Sonata, a tribute to American Transcendentalist thinkers and writers, whose influences resonate through its four movements. From the ponderous opening of “Emerson” to the final querulous chord and four ghost notes that conclude the sonata, Drury infused the performance with focus, fidelity, and reckless abandon, particularly in the psychedelic “Hawthorne.”
In the misty and mystical finale, “Thoreau,” Drury brought a sense of wary introspection to this movement, which is laden with unanswered questions. Ives often explores the margins of music, a point clearly articulated in this memorable recital.
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