What to make of Charles Ives (1874-1954)? Samuel Barber, with whom he shares the program on this disc considered him "an amateur, a hack who didn't put pieces together well." This comment was unfashionable when Barber made it about twenty-five years ago, and so it remains today.

It's true that Ives wrote music that sometimes relied more on nifty ideas than musical insight but at his best he could turn out the occasional masterpiece. His Concord Sonata is an example. A thorny work indeed, it may strike some listeners as willfully complex and dissonant, but it's hard to deny the cumulative power it exercises on a listener of moderate sophistication.

It is in four movements, each inspired by a a personality from the intellectual community of mid-nineteenth centurey Concord, Massachusettes: Emerson, Hawthorne, the Alcotts and Thoreau.

Marc-André Hamelin, who makes a specialty of playing underperformed music, meets the sonata's fearsome technical demands with apparent ease. He performed it at the National Arts Centre eight or ten years ago and I've been waiting ever since for him to record it. (Actually, he had already recorded it back then on New World Records and that version is still available by direct order, though I've not heard it.)

For the first few moments of the Barber sonata, it seems almost as though it's going to be a clone of the Ives. The structure is complex and the harmony dissonant. It soon becomes apparent, though, that this is a more conservative work, even though it's among Barber's most "modern."

It is a wonderful piece and too little known, which puts it right up Hamelin's alley. He delivers an utterly convincing account of it and whether or not Barber would approve of the coupling, these two sonatas form an excellent coupling.