The Unknown Ives

Donald Berman, piano"Donald Berman is a superlative pianist, but as any number of attempts by excellent players have shown, it takes more than technique to bring Ives alive. To my ears Berman's Ives most resembles the playing of Ives himself, as we hear it in the composer's private recordings. With Berman there is the same subtlety of voicing you hear in Ives’s playing, the same power combined with delicacy— a surprising thing to say about Ives, but that's how he often played his own music. Berman studied with John Kirkpatrick, the composer's first great interpreter, and kept growing from those studies. Ives was a prophetic genius whose consciousness, and piano writing, stayed rooted in Romanticism. For a pianist that's a very difficult balancing act, but Berman handles it beautifully."A new generation of performers are reaching a mature and seasoned approach to Ives, and Donald Berman is a vital part of that achievement."  —Jan Swafford, Author of Charles Ives: A Life with Music (1996