A couple of weeks ago, even before we went to Illinois, I hung around in the city one evening to go to a concert at New England Conservatory given by Stephen Drury, who's on the piano faculty and in charge of something called the "Summer Institute of Contemporary Piano Performance", or SICPP (he likes to call it "Sick Puppy"). There were several recitals to given that week by various people most of them consisting of music written 10 minutes ago, but I wanted to hear this one for Ives' Concord Sonata, one of the great piano works of the 20th century. Drury performed from memory, with the block of wood but without the viola and flute, and it was a very good performance. He didn't schmaltz up some of it as much as I would, but that's okay, it just came across as being a little more cerebral than I think Ives should be credited with.



I finally had a chance last night to play through a couple of movements myself. When I was a senior in college I was particularly smitten with this piece, actually had a couple of movements memorized and was hoping to perform it before the school year ended, but couldn't get it worked up in time to get the sign-off from LD. Playing the first couple of movements used to drive people out of the adjacent practice rooms. When I first played the Alcotts movement for Davis, he said at the end, "you really have an affinity for this, don't you?", which was as much of a compliment as you could ever hope to hear from him. I always thought one of my strengths was the ability to play contemporary music as though it were written in a previous century. Ives, for all the dissonance and rapid changes of mood, is still basically romantic music, and if you play it like that I tend to think it can be fairly accessible even to the average listener.



Drury spoke for a couple of minutes before the program and talked about the chutzpah or audacity or whatever he called it of writing what is essentially program music about philosophers. The evocative nature of this and lot of other of Ives' work gave you a feel for New England, even out in the middle of the midwest, and I was always a fan of the transcendentalists, particularly Thoreau. The misfortunes of bad timing meant that I came to the sonata too late to be able to perform it in college, and once out of college there wasn't enough time to spend on it (the rest of the program would have been my reduction of Milhaud's "Le Boeuf sur la Toit" for Trumpet, wind quintet and piano). Drury's been able to live with it for quite a few years now, and it shows in the performance I think, it must be neat to be able to live with music like that for long periods of time.