IVES Piano Sonata No. 1 in C  John Noel Roberts (pn)  ALBANY TROY 1981 (40:02) Charles Ives remains sui generis in the world of classical music. With the possible exception of his friend and fellow New Englander Carl Ruggles, no one else sounds even remotely like him. Ives’s knotty dissonances; his cheery disregard, verging on contempt, for the conventional rules of how music should be constructed (which he associated with Germany and its “schools”); and his sudden interjections of banal hymn tunes and pop songs of his time in the middle of his most crabbed structures created a musical language that hit the classical-music world hard when Ives’s scores began to be rediscovered in the early 1950’s and even harder when the Ives centennial rolled around in 1974. Ives wrote two piano sonatas, and the first – composed between 1902 and 1910 but mothballed by the composer for decades – has lived most of its life in the shadow of his second, the “Concord” sonata. Ives biographer Jan Swofford describes it as one of Ives’s two “orphan” works (the other is the Robert Browning Overture) which he put aside after he was unable to come up with a final form that pleased him. Yet Ives, who lived until 1954, allowed pianist William Masselos to play the world premiere in 1949 and make the first record for Columbia in 1953. Though other pianists played the Ives Sonata No. 1, Masselos had a “hold” on the work through much of his lifetime (he died in 1992). He not only made the first record in 1953, he remade the work for RCA Victor in 1967 in the first stereo recording of it. Masselos reveled in the work’s sudden dramatic contrasts, particularly its interpolation of the hymn tune “Bringing in the Sheaves” in the second and especially the fourth movements. His Columbia recording ran 33:35 and his RCA remake was even quicker at 31:14. By contrast, John Noel Roberts brings us a kinder, gentler and definitely slower Ives. The printed timing for his version is 40:02 (though the readout on my player was even longer: 41:01), and his times are longer in all five movements. Roberts’s first movement takes 9:18, versus 7:27 for Masselos I and 6:54 for Masselos II. The second movement is 6:45 in Roberts’s version, as opposed to 5:05 in Masselos 1 and 5:11 in Masselos II. The third movement is 7:41 (Roberts), 6:59 (Masselos I) and 6:25 (Masselos II). The fourth is 5:24 in Roberts’s rendition, versus 3:35 in Masselos I and 3:39 in Masselos II. And Roberts spends 11:50 on the finale where Masselos dispatched it in 9:29 in 1953 and 9:05 in 1967. Roberts’s program notes are more about Ives’s programmatic intentions for the music than Roberts’s own interpretation. He quotes Ives telling his friend, pianist John Kirkpatrick (1905-1991), that the first sonata is about a New England family whose son runs off to “sow his wild oats.” The first movement represents the family together; the second and fourth, for which Ives drew on some earlier pieces in ragtime, depict the son sowing the proverbial wild oats. The third movement shows the family’s anxiety over his long absence, and the finale represents his return home and the joy the family felt over their reunion. In Roberts’s essay, he quotes some bizarre comments Ives wrote in the margins of the sonata’s score, including one on the second movement: “Anything … to kill those weak sissies and don’t be bossed by some silly German lily ear velvet rule sounds.” He similarly penned in the margins of the fourth movement, “Not for the lilies lying back on soft dress circle crude cushions to lap up pretty velvet sound with their soft ears.” Oddly, Roberts’s slower tempos soften the music’s impact and blur its rough edges. The opening of the sonata sounds, in Roberts’s hands, like Debussy – albeit Debussy on steroids – and the interpolated hymn tunes (not only “Bringing in the Sheaves” but “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” “I Was a Wandering Sheep,” “Where Is My Wandering Boy Tonight?,” and “I Hear Thy Welcome Voice”) don’t have quite the shock value they do in Masselos’s recordings. But rather than sounding wrong, Roberts’s readings seem like a different but equally valid alternative way of interpreting Ives. If Masselos and other Ives players made him sound like the always wandering boy, truly at home nowhere, Roberts brings Ives into the fold at last, smoothing out the discontinuities of his score and welcoming him into the classical-music pantheon. Charles Ives is big enough to be playable both as the eternal rebel and as the neo-traditionalist which he comes off as here. Mark Gabrish Conlan Five stars: A kinder, gentler, slower version of Charles Ives’s First Sonata