Charles Ives - Sonatas for Violin and Piano

Charles IVES (1874-1954)

Violin Sonata No. 3

First Sonata for Violin and Piano

Second Sonata for Violin and Piano

Fourth Sonata for Violin and Piano, "Children's Day at the Camp Meeting"

Liana Gourdjia (Violin)

Matan Porat (Piano)

Recorded at the Rainier III, Auditorium, Monaco 

Jakob Kreizberg Concert Hall from 31 March to 2 April 2018

Reviews:

"Free to write music that no one should play": the American composer Charles Ives (1874-1954) has thus honored himself not to depend on anyone, to conceive a deliberately unheard of language… The performers are in tune with this freedom, between the untied and lyrical violin of the Russian Liana Gourd." Jia and the Piano It was built by Israeli Matan Porat. Less known than its vast symphonic pages, Charles Ives' sonatas give a concentrate of fragility combined with a power of inspiration. The fact of bringing them together on the same recording allows us to grasp the complete originality, like a newspaper that travels through his life. Liana Gourdjia and Matan Porat will give the sonatas of Charles Ives in concert on March 28, 2019, as part of the Festival du Printemps des Arts de Monte-Carlo.

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Charles Ives, a New Englander, was taught first by his father, then at Yale by the German-trained Horatio Parker. Ives was unique for his time as an American composer who wrote works in the “classical-music” tradition but also drew on American popular and traditional music idioms. A life-insurance executive professionally, he created an extraordinary body of compositions only later recognized as a treasurable legacy. Among Ives’s chamber works are multi-movement “sets” for small ensembles, string quartets, piano sonatas, and other pieces. He also completed (ca. 1902–1916) these four sonatas for violin and piano—conventional in external structure (each in three contrasting movements) but unconventional in being musically rooted in Protestant American hymnody.

From Naxos