Fanfare Magazine

I  am old enough to remember when a performance or recording of Charles  Ives’s “Concord” Sonata was an event. While a new recording may not yet  be commonplace, neither is it rare. The young American pianist Reed  Tetzloff has a great deal of competition, and one pianist, Marc-André  Hamelin, has even recorded it twice.

By  combining Beethoven’s penultimate sonata with Ives’s second, Tetzloff  has chosen to underline the relationship between the two composers. To  begin with, the famous four-note motto that opens Beethoven’s Fifth  Symphony is a thread that runs throughout the “Concord” Sonata. Both  composers stretched the musical boundaries that existed when they began  composing and wrote their own new musical laws. Tetzloff concludes his  perceptive booklet note with this: “Beethoven and Ives did indeed invade  the unknown. They knocked on the door of the divine mysteries,  confident that they were worthy to look inside. Yet, the greatest  miracle lies in how they revealed to us, through mere notes on the page,  a glimpse of what they saw.”

Although  both of these works can encourage the tempestuous side of a pianist,  Tetzloff emphasizes the more lyrical and poetic aspects of the music. Do  not take this to imply a lack of drama. The pianist refers in his notes  to the “heaven storming outbursts of Ives’s Emerson [movement],” and he  delivers these outbursts with plenty of power. But where some other  pianists come off almost brittle in the way they articulate the music,  Tetzloff’s playing is forceful without ever turning harsh. His tempi are  slightly slower than the norm, but it is the transparency of his  textures and the warmth of his touch that stand out. Hamelin also avoids  brittleness, particularly in his second recording, but at his fast  speeds the music takes on a breathless quality. With Pierre-Laurent  Aimard (along with Hamelin’s a recording favored by many) the emphasis  is also on clarity of texture, though to my ears Tetzloff adds a degree  of warmth and a wider range of colors. Emi Ferguson’s flute solo in the  concluding “Thoreau” movement is lovely.

As  with the Ives, if you are looking for heaven-storming Beethoven, you  should look elsewhere in op. 110. Tetzloff takes a more inward-looking  and meditative approach. In his review of a Schumann disc in Fanfare  45:1, Huntley Dent writes about how “maturely Tetzloff approached such a  fascinating, whimsical, impetuous, self-divided genius as Schumann.” It  is that same mature intellect that impresses me about the pianist’s  approach to the two sonatas here. He has thought deeply about all  aspects of these pieces and given us fresh-sounding performances.

The  45-page booklet that comes with the disc contains a comprehensive note  by Jan Swafford along with Tetzloff’s notes. It also (and this might be a  first) gives us biographies not only of Tetzloff, flutist Ferguson, and  producer Steven Epstein, but also of annotator Swafford, recording  engineer Rick Jacobsohn, and piano technician John Von Rohr! The piano  sound is completely natural.

Henry Fogel

Five stars: Beautiful performances of Sonatas by Ives and Beethoven