Ives

In a second disc of Ives’s songs, the unbeatable partnership of Finley and Drake again enthral their listeners and bring them to the emotional core of each work. The range of style and approach in Ives’s text-setting is startling—from simple, sentimental ballads to complex and strenuous philosophical discourses, sometimes encompassing the most dissonant and virtuosic piano parts, sometimes with the accompaniment pared down to an almost minimalist phrase-repetition. Even those composed in a superficially conventional or ‘polite’ tonal idiom usually contain harmonic, rhythmic or accentual surprises somewhere.

Donald Berman is a superlative pianist, but as any number of attempts by excellent players have shown, it takes more than technique to bring Ives alive. To my ears Berman's Ives most resembles the playing of Ives himself, as we hear it in the composer's private recordings. With Berman there is the same subtlety of voicing you hear in Ives's playing, the same power combined with delicacy—a surprising thing to say about Ives, but that's how he often played his own music. Berman studied with John Kirkpatrick, the composer's first great interpreter, and kept growing from those studies. Ives was a prophetic genius whose consciousness, and piano writing, stayed rooted in Romanticism. For a pianist that's a very difficult balancing act, but Berman handles it beautifully. A new generation of performers are reaching a mature and seasoned approach to Ives, and Donald Berman is a vital part of that achievement.

Jan Swafford, author of "Charles Ives: A Life with Music" (1996, W.W. Norton)