Heather O'Donnell/Responses to Ives
Bob Gilmore
Heather O’Donnell, Responses to Ives, Mode Records (Mode 211)
I’ve never much enjoyed Charles Ives’ shorter works for piano, as opposed to the magnificence of his orchestral music where the colliding layers of his ever-excitable musical imagination can be heard to best advantage. The short piano pieces – which include studies, ‘take-offs’ (Ivesian shorthand for parodies or jokes), ‘transcriptions’ (reworkings of parts of his longer pieces) and others – have always seemed to me, for all their technical innovation, cantankerous and uncommunicative, inhabiting a private world filled with post-adolescent naughtiness and a kind of aggressive humour, harbouring all sorts of grievances with the world at...
