Louise Bessette, Isaac Chalk & Jeffrey Stonehouse – Port of Call: New England (Top Albums 2024)

After stopping off in Curaçao and Buenos Aires in her last opus, internationally-renowned Canadian pianist Louise Bessette brings her suitcase – and her piano – to our neighbors to the south. For this latest instalment in her A Piano around the World series, Bessette takes us to Concord, Massachusetts and Danbury, Connecticut, in the footsteps of Charles Ives, to present one of the composer’s landmark works, his Piano Sonata No. 2, subtitled “Concord Mass”. An emblematic figure of modern American music in the early 20th century, Ives is a composer with a distinctive, composite and avant-garde style. The year 2024, which marks his 150ᵉ birth anniversary, is the perfect excuse to discover some of his repertoire and musical universe. And what a universe it is!

Organized in traditional sonata form, each of the four movements is named after a poet associated with transcendentalism, the Concord-based politico-religious movement that postulated that “all experience can lead to knowledge of the Universe”. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Bronson and Louisa May Alcott, and Henry David Thoreau are evoked in each movement. Ives was a composer whose work is marked by great experimentation, by the explosion of forms and styles, and heterogeneous passages. For example, the famous motif from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is quoted several times, as the metric changes, atonal textures and lyrical flights of fancy are mastered with expertise by Louise Bessette, who delivers each element with precision and sensitivity. Isaac Chalk (viola) and Jeffrey Stonehouse (flute) complete the work, respectively in interventions in the first and last movements, marked as optional in a manuscript version revised in 1947 by the composer.

Radically different in style and character, if not more bucolic, Edward MacDowell’s New England Idylls are colorful sonic paintings that bring contrasting elements to this disc/travelogue of two extremes in tonality at the turn of modernity that is, truly, an experience in itself.