A Mainstream Marvel

Mayer’s hyper-detailed account is free of dogma and ideological point-scoring. Some may want an aesthetically edgier view but Mayer’s sincerity is persuasive. © 2012 Gramophone

Alexei Lubimov and Pierre-Laurent Aimard, both also include the Ives’s brief (and optional) obbligatos for viola and flute in the first and fourth movements respectively. Steven Mayer, who omits them, is also remarkably lucid and sympathetic, and he ends the finale most movingly and memorably. As couplings he offers also the tough, though briefly soft-centred, Varied Air and Variations and The Celestial Railroad, a nightmarish, noisy train journey, a trip to a promised land which never materializes. The Emerson Transcription is essentially a reworking of the opening material of the Sonata, and of less general interest.