IVES Piano Sonata No. 1  John Noel Roberts (pn)  ALBANY 1981 (41:00) Ives considered that he had two “orphans,” pieces that he was never satisfied with and eventually left alone. One was the dense and difficult Robert Browning Overture, the other his early, exploratory Piano Sonata No. 1. The sonata is a five-movement narrative that follows the son of a “united family” who is dissatisfied with his lot. He wanders afield to sow his wild oats, which causes his family great anxiety, but his wandering continues. These four episodes lead to the end of the arc in the fifth movement, when the son returns to his united family to stay. Whether the journey is autobiographical is open to conjecture. In the long period when he was occupied with composing the work—roughly from 1901 to 1910, allowing for tinkering as late as 1919—Ives scribbled comments on the manuscript, but the initials and names (Dan S. and L.H., for example) suggest people he knew. The wandering son doesn’t explicitly have to be him unless you are a literalist. Ives’s restless imagination is the persistent theme of his career. If experimentation took him far from home (conventional tonality and melody), his returns were just as frequent. The sonata is a mosaic, partially assembled from earlier pieces like Four Ragtime Dances and the lost Recital Piece for Organ. The presence of traditional New England hymns is another kind of home for him, spiritually speaking—the terrain is recognizable from the Second Symphony but more rugged and complicated. As rhapsodic as the music sounds, there is hidden structure. To quote the very readable program notes by pianist John Noel Roberts, “A germ motive (a descending minor second and minor third) permeates the entire 40-minute sonata and hauntingly culminates the entire composition.” The score is both complete and formative. The music presents a finished portrait of outdoor life in the Connecticut that Ives grew up in, where hymns were sung outside in the summer, recreation included jigs and reels at barn dances, nature sounds brought woodland rambles to life, and young men wandered off farms for short or long sojourns, sometimes never to return. The incomplete aspect of the score refers to Ives experimenting with his methods of collage and free harmony in preparation for the even more radical “Concord” Sonata and Symphony No. 4. Roberts is up to every challenge in this unjustly neglected work, embracing its many moods and uniting every episode through his intensity and presence. He also conveys how entertaining and filled with personality Sonata No. 1 can be. There are many moments when the wandering son is a wild child, very nearly a lost soul, as Ives’s pious audience would have seen him. In his lifetime, Ives’s listeners knew the quoted hymns so well that the words were enough to unfold the narrative. Roberts comments, “The most prevalent hymn quoted in the first movement is ‘I Was a Wondering Sheep,’ with the words ‘I was a wand’ring sheep, I did not love the fold, I did not love my Shepherd’s voice, I would not be controlled.” Anyone who knows Ives’s music well would murmur, “Indeed.” No one in American music was less controllable, even by himself, one imagines. It saddens me that Ives’s strain of Americana has faded to a shadow. Will younger listeners in particular recognize the quoted snatches of “What a friend we have in Jesus” and “Bringing in the sheaves,” much less the rare ones like “Where is my boy tonight”? But Ives isn’t quaintly Anmerican. He was as ambitious to create an entire world as Mahler. Roberts reminds us of this when he says, “There is a large epical quality about the First Sonata for Piano that influences every aspect of the composition.” Those hymns are pointing to the transcendent as surely as a sublime Mahler Adagio. A piece as satisfying as Ives’s sonata deserves to be appreciated on its own, but it can also be heard as a listener’s trial run for the “Concord” Sonata. The score’s dissonances, tone clusters, and emotional extremes sound less forbidding. Where the “Concord” Sonata can’t help but be exhausting, Piano Sonata No. 1 is a whirling, exhilarating adventure. In no small part Roberts’s beautiful performance shows exactly what that means. The music and the performance are both a triumph. Huntley Dent Five stars: A triumphant reading of Ives’s adventurous, neglected sonata