Three-Page Sonata

Charles Ives’s shortest piano sonata - the manuscript is only three pages long - contains more than its fair share of problems. Written in 1905, four years before the full-length Piano Sonata No.1 and ten years before the monumental “Concord” Sonata, it was described by the composer, with characteristic scorn for those in search of easy listening, as a “joke to knock the mollycoddles out of their boxes and to kick out the softy ears.”

Certainly, it takes a hardy ear, as well as a more than usually perceptive one, to follow Ives’s obsessively complicated treatment of the familiar BACH motif in the opening Allegro moderato. It dissolves, however, into the central Adagio and a contemplation of another of his favourite themes, the Westminster Chimes, which echoes from the distance in a still multi-layered but poetic rather than argumentative keyboard texture. There is no refuge for the mollycoddled ear in the two aggressive marches and the frenzied ragtime trios that follow and somehow, after roughing up of the same two themes, lead to a plainly C major ending.