Sara Laimon appears here on her first solo album. She is one of the pianists of the Musicians’ Accord venture, the other being Amy Rubin (who also is a composer). There is no doubt that Laimon is a sensitive and forceful artist, with lots of skill and imagination, the way she treats the two pieces on this disc.

Aaron Copland began writing the score that eventually would lead up to “Piano Fantasy” already back in 1951, when he received a commission from the Louisville Orchestra for a piano concerto that would be premiered by nowadays cult-dubbed late pianist William Kapell. However, the commission never reached its completion, and ultimately Kapell died in a plane crash… and he now appears on several historically inclined labels.
Nonetheless, Copland commenced the work, molding it into a solo piano work, which he dedicated to the Kapell who would have played it in its original “to-be”-guise. The aim now was to complete the composition as a new commission for the 50th anniversary of honorable Juilliard School of Music.
Aaron Copland found himself indulged in a pretty tough feat. He explains:

“I have been battling with the piece. It is, as we say, a very hard nut to crack! The no repetitions and no formulas makes the piece hard to get hold of. By the time I have figured out the notes, I cannot hear the music. I have to be inside and outside of the work at the same time – lost in it, yet watching the composition being led”.

The piece was not ready for the Juilliard anniversary. When it finally was premiered in late 1957 with William Masselos at the keyboard it was booed by Morton Feldman on the balcony… but most of the audience was enthusiastic.

The work sounds as if it is improvised, especially if a specially gifted pianist soars through it – and that is the case on this CD! However, the free-spirited feel is scored, by instructions like “in a bold and declamatory manner”, “clangorous”, “bell-like”, “brooding”, “hurried and tense”, “soft and clear”, “poetic drifting”, “quite fast and rhythmic”, “violent”, “with mounting excitement”, “as at first” and so on…

Opposites are at play. Copland applies a ten-note row, using some methods from twelve-tone music, but he viewed the music as tonally conceived. A word that is used in the booklet is “pseudo-spontaneity”; a suiting term. The sense of complete spontaneity would fall flat into a pitiful grimace if the player weren’t on the level with the difficulties inherent in the music. It is remarkable how well Sara Laimon executes her artistic duties, leaving nothing else to wish for. Listening through her dance through the Copland landscape is like sitting in a Swedish forest spring slope with a thermos of hot coffee among the dispersed showers of naked, blue, luminous Anemone Hepatica on a backdrop of yesteryears brown leaves on the ground, with the thrushes signaling their territories up in the branches… and the white pre-summer clouds torn by the winds on high drift past… and it feels so good, so cozy and fresh inside your sweater and wind-jacket, sipping the coffee, your being at rest, your mind hovering over the clear and reflecting pond of your spirit… accompanied by this piano solo, wherein crystal prisms slowly circle each other, emitting clusters of many-colored light…revealing the Buddha-nature of enlightenment…

Mode’s beautifully managed recording technique is apparent from the very first clear, thunderous chords, stepping cautiously through the first “pseudo-improvised” bars. I like this loud. I turn up the dial a little, to experience the overtones of the vibrating piano strings of the instrument, tuned and readied by technician Timothy Robinson.

Faster events combine with the more cautious expressions later, and the ingenuity of the composer readily reveals itself in the long strings of ebony and ivory spiraling out of the extended fingerings of Sara Laimon; her long, dark, curly hair shining as she rocks in beat with the complexity of the tonal progressions… and suddenly Copland pulls the breaks, halts, looks around… trips nervously to the side, looks around again, sticks his foot investigatively in front of him, tries out the ground on which to tread – then dashes forth through the terrain, the bark flaking off of the trees!

Copland’s “Piano Fantasy” turns inward towards the conclusion, legs crossed, the tip-of-the
-nose-glance inducing an outstretched hypnosis, into which you enter in a free fall around the globe, perfectly balancing gravity and the centrifugal force like a satellite in orbit, at ease with the circumstances, however trying, of human existence…

Charles Ives’s “Piano Sonata No.1” does emerge out of the heavy shadow of his “Concord Sonata”, but deserves a spotlight all to itself, which Sara Laimon’s playing does offer it. The antecedents of the piece are not without complications. Ives wrote it over a span of several years (1901 – 1909) and assembled the parts in 1919. Lou Harrison “deciphered” the manuscript in the 1940s, and in 1954 Harrison and the premiering pianist – William Masselos – published the score. That means that it took fifty-three years from the time Ives started composing the piece until it was available as a score! Furthermore, Sara Laimon here performs from the 1990 reprint of the score with additional corrections supplied by John A. Buchanan and Jerry E. Bramblett.
The music is mostly massive, and as the booklet says; “drenched in chromatic density”, but the texture sometimes loosens up in lucid clarity of chordal transparency. Lou Harrison rendered the piece this expressive description:

“This is probably the penultimate romantic sonata. The flowing, sumptuous character of the sonata, its range of contemplative and heroic, as well as fantastic, expressions, indicate the ‘grand manner’.“

Ives utilizes sections of gospel hymns from his boyhood, like “Lebanon”, “Where Is My Wandering Boy”, “Happy Day”, “Welcome Voice”, “Erie” and “Bringing In the Sheaves”. Even his inclination towards ragtime lends its atmosphere at times. In later section of his sonata he bangs away in rhythmic adventures and cluster-phobias (!) worthy of George Antheil.

The couple Henry Cowell and Sidney Robertson Cowell wrote in their Ives biography:

“Ives’s aim is not to make the form simple and clear, but rather to create an underlying unity out of a large number of diverse elements, used asymmetrically; he thus relates his music by analogy to the individual’s experience of life. The sense of unity is not brought about through exact repetition, either of motifs or of sections, but is established through relationships. And Ives prefers that that these relationships should not be too obvious. There must always be something for the mind and feeling to work on, some new aspect of relationship to be found. If everything is self-evident, that spiritual inactivity that Ives so abhors might be induced”.