Chicago Classical Review

The 150^th birthday of American visionary Charles Ives passed largely unnoticed in the Windy City last year. The Chicago Sinfonietta’s one-performance retrospective and the American Music Project’s Ives’ First String Quartet were the only notable exceptions to the otherwise bewildering neglect.

Canadian pianist Marc-André Hamelin provided a belated celebration Sunday afternoon on the SCP Piano Series at Orchestra Hall, where he delivered a towering, definitive account of Ives’ Piano Sonata No. 2 (Concord, Mass., 1840-60), the composer’s heady homage to American Transcendentalism, written between 1907-1912.

The Concord Sonata is symphonic in scope and depth. Each of its four substantial movements—the first two of which were in fact initially conceived as orchestral scores—evokes the spirit and philosophy of a different American Transcendentalist, collectively spanning 50 minutes in performance.

Hamelin had the full measure of Ives’ iconoclastic writing. From the declamatory opening of “Emerson,” he charted the movement’s meandering philosophizing while maintaining a clear sense of line and direction. Here as throughout the performance Hamelin’s dynamic flexibility was astounding, at times shifting on a dime from chords of clangorous density to single threads of tone, the latter emphasizing the movement’s few moments of repose.

The Canadian pianist (who now resides in Massachusetts) dashed off the precipitous scampering of “Hawthorne,” deftly using a ruler-sided wooden board to create hazy pentatonic clusters of black keys. There is a moment when a quiet church hymn is interrupted by jarring cacophony, which visibly jolted much of the audience, before Hamelin whipped up a raucous carnival atmosphere to close the second sketch.

The opening serenity of “The Alcotts” was disrupted by a ringing cell phone, but Hamelin nonetheless captured the movement’s spirit of domestic warmth, with its contrasting quotations from Beethoven’s Fifth harkening back to the first movement’s muscularity. The final “Thoreau” is naturalistic and contemplative, with harmonic mist channeling the famous Walden Pond. Here Hamelin’s voicing was impeccable, with fistfuls of notes registering with clarity, before the quiet, questioning final bars.

Hamelin received an enthusiastic ovation for one of the finest solo piano outings at Orchestra Hall in recent years.

If Sunday’s second half felt fractionally more routine, it was only by comparison to the revelatory first.

Schumann’s Fantasy Pieces, Op. 12, from 1837, vacillate between the modes of the composer’s contrasting creative alter-egos—the spirited Florestan and more introspective Eusebius. Hamelin playfully conveyed the mercurial back-and-forth of the eight short movements. We first met Eusebius in Hamelin’s untroubled account of “In the Evening,” and the impetuous Florestan promptly appeared in the ensuing “Soaring.”

The fluctuations continued as Hamelin’s wistful pensiveness in “Why?” gave way to the regality of his reading of “Whims.” “Dreams Confusions” went with antic breathlessness, contrasted with an eloquent central statement, before Hamelin brought both strains of the composer’s personality into a tentative accord with “End of the Song.”

Scriabin packs an enormous degree of detail into the eight minutes of his Sonata in F-sharp Major, Op. 30, no. 4, a study in condensed expression that he casts in two connected movements. The opening Andante of the 1903 work is probing, with vague tonal commitments, and Hamelin’s account captured this air of generative ambiguity. The bounding Prestissimo volando follows a loosely associational logic, though Hamelin’s virtuosic vision brought structure to its amorphous textures, which he drove to an ecstatic conclusion.

Further ovations brought the Canadian back for two encores, the first of which was a pellucid performance of Ravel’s Jeax d’eau. Ravel’s limpid miniature was composed almost contemporaneously with the Scriabin, and Hamelin’s sensitive rendering filled out an engrossing picture of the European musical landscape in the early years of the 20^th century.

Hamelin followed this with the Appassionato (No. 5) from Rachmaninoff’s Op. 39 set of Etudes-tableaux, which received an impassioned reading before its tranquil conclusion closed the afternoon on a note of repose.

The SCP Piano Series next hosts Benjamin Grosvenor in music of Beethoven, Schumann, Scriabin, and Ravel, 3 p.m. March 8. cso.org

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