John Kirkpatrick's second recording of Ives's "Concord" Sonata has routinely been described as "legendary." For once, the reality lives up to the hype. The recording is, indeed, the one by which all others are judged. A notoriously difficult work, the sonata suffers first from the idea that it is a single work. Ives himself never quite thought of it as ever being in a completed form, which, of course, makes it difficult to perform. (Incidentally, there's an entire section of my dissertation dedicated to coming to terms with what the heck a "finished" piece is in Ives's output, and under which circumstances one should alter the text).

The thing about Kirkpatrick's rendition is that he understood that to play this piece properly, one needs to really live with it for a long time. By the time he made his first recording, let alone this one, the work was long a part of his repertoire. The problem which most performances suffer is that they sound like a mishmash of unrelated moments, with no real sense of flow, of spacial elements, of continuity, or of the incessant musical references Ives makes. Additionally, they generally are rather bombastically performed. Kirkpatrick's rendition suffers none of this.

After far too long, the recording has finally been released on CD, thanks to the ever-forward-looking people at ArkivMusic. As a bonus, they also reissued Ives's own performance of excepts from the Sonata.