Pasa Reviews Santa Fe New Music: From Thoreau to Cage: American Voices Dec. 11, Scottish Rite Center Accord in 'Concord'

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In 1998, a correspondent for The Boston Globe wrote that a recital by pianist Stephen Drury left him feeling "both bruised and uplifted." After hearing Drury play Charles Ives' mammoth Piano Sonata No. 2, "Concord, Mass., 1840," on this concert, I knew what he meant. Drury's projection of the three-quarter-hour, four- movement, seldom-heard work left me feeling as though I'd been thoroughly noogied with one creative hand while being gently patted on the back with the other. I've not felt so artistically stimulated -- or shaken up -- in a long, long time.

The effect didn't come just because Drury is a master of this piece, which was completed in 1915 but substantially revised (and made more complicated) in 1947. It was not just his skill at bringing out the many musical quotations scattered about, either, from Beethoven's Fifth to "Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean." Nor was it solely the unusually responsive and well-tuned piano provided by Santa Fe New Music. It was how all those things were buttressed by technique, brain, and heart to form an experience that was dramatic as well as musical.

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Pasa Reviews Santa Fe New Music: From Thoreau to Cage: American Voices Dec. 11, Scottish Rite Center Accord in 'Concord'

In effect, Drury poetically lectured us in the four movements. "Emerson" was powerful and noisy; "...

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