Philip Mead - Varied Air - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

The solo piano music of Ives represents an extraordinary achievement. Experimental is a word often associated with it. But experimental in what sense? Certainly he was exploring a wholly unique and personal style. Ives' music is by turns, exploratory, powerful, sensitive and transcendental always wholly consistent within it's own, sometimes highly unusual terms. These qualities are there in abundance in his two crowning achievements the first and second sonatas. The studies and others orbit round these like planets to twin suns. VOTED GRAMOPHONE MAGAZINE TOP CHOICE 2012 (for the Concord Sonata) Album Tracks 1. Piano Sonata No 2 Emmerson 2. Piano Sonata No 2 Hawthorne 3. Piano Sonata No 2 the Alcotts 4. Piano Sonata No 2 Thoreau 5. Three Page Sonata 6. Study No 2 Varied Air and Variations 7. Study No 9 the Anti Abolitionist Riots 8. Waltz-Rondo 1. Piano Sonata No 1 I 2. Piano Sonata No 1 Iia 3. Piano Sonata No 1 Iib 4. Piano Sonata No 1 III 5. Piano Sonata No 1 Iva 6. Piano Sonata No 1 Ivb 7. Piano Sonata No 1 V 8. Study No 20 9. Study No 21 10. Study No 22 11. Study No 23 12. The Seen and Unseen? 13. Rough and Ready Et Al 14. Song Without (Good) Words 15. Scene Episode 16. Bad Resolutions and Good Wan