Nathan Williamson - Great American Sonatas (2017)

SOMM ushers in the New Year with an invigorating new release of American Piano Sonatas to remind us of 20th-century America's achievements in music.

SOMM's new collaboration with pianist Nathan Williamson who has been steeped in American music since his years as a student of piano and composition at Yale has produced an exhilarating disc brimming with dynamism and energy. The disc includes sonatas by four very different American composers writing under very different circumstances: Leonard Bernstein, a charismatic, ambitious all-round musician in his student years; Aaron Copland, an established master at the height of his powers; Lou Harrison, an inveterate experimentalist setting himself a new problem; and Charles Ives, a dogged individualist insisting on his own way of doing things. In each case, the composer chose not to fit his music into conventional forms, but to rethink the whole idea of the sonata. America is after all the land of the clean sheet, the fresh start – of making things fresh, exciting and new.

In addition to his stellar international career as a conductor and his work as a composer, Leonard Bernstein was also a gifted concert pianist, although this is hardly reflected in his keyboard compositions, which consist mostly of collections of occasional miniatures. The “Juvenilia” section of his catalogue, though, includes a more substantial Piano Sonata. Bernstein wrote it in 1938, during his junior year at Harvard University. The Sonata is in two movements, fantasy-like in their construction but closely integrated, in their material.

Aaron Copland began his Piano Sonata in 1939 and completed it in 1941. It was premiered by John Kirkpatrick in New York in 1943 with a later New York performance given by Bernstein, who also recorded the work. The Sonata belongs to Copland's highly successful middle period. It suggests an expansive landscape, but, with its high level of dissonance, a harsh and bleak one. There are three closely related movements, arranged in a slow–fast–slow pattern and played without a break.

Born in Oregon, Lou Harrison grew up in California, where he studied with Henry Cowell, began a long friendship with John Cage, and later enrolled in Arnold Schoenberg’s composition class. He absorbed an eclectic range of influences: he composed in Schoenberg’s twelvenote serial technique for some years. A pianist in his youth, Harrison wrote a great deal of piano music. The two works recorded here date from the late 1930s.

The Largo Ostinato was written in 1937 and dedicated to John Dobson, an astronomer friend; it was revised in 1970. The piano score is written without bar lines and without dynamic markings. The “ostinato” of the title is a figure lasting four slow quavers (eighth-notes) which is calmly repeated in the left hand throughout the piece. Above it, the right hand plays a single melodic line.

The Third Piano Sonata was written in 1938, and first performed by the composer in a radio broadcast that year. The work exemplifies a recurring feature of Harrison’s music, his imposition of strict rules on himself in the process of composition. Thus the first movement, its harmonic and melodic consistency assured, is able to unfold its melodic line freely without a traditional formal scheme. The second movement, however, is couched in the form of a scherzo and trio with an exact reprise. The finale is a melodic epilogue, in clear octaves throughout until they are blurred by touches of harmony towards the end.

TRACKLIST
01. Piano Sonata: I. Molto moderato
02. Piano Sonata: II. Vivace
03. Piano Sonata: III. Andante sostenuto
04. Piano Sonata: I. Cadenza. Presto - Molto moderato - Scherzando
05. Piano Sonata: II. Largo - Moderato
06. Piano Sonata No. 3: I. Slowish & Singing
07. Piano Sonata No. 3: II. Fast & Rugged
08. Piano Sonata No. 3: III. Very Slow, Very Singing & Solemn
09. Largo ostinato
10. 3-Page Sonata
11. The Celestial Railroad