The debut album ‘Each and All’ of pianist Shane van Neerden, released by the label 7 Mountain Records, is a tour-de-force. The double-CD was recorded during the span of four days in Hilversum's Studio 5. The program comprises three of the biggest piano works of the 20th century: Charles Ives’ Concord Sonata, Maurice Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit, en Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Sonata. This double-CD embodies many of the principles of the Transcendentalist movement, who prized individualism of thought and subjectivity of experience but also the innate connections between all creatures—“each and all.”

 

 

Charles Ives’ second piano sonata, Concord, Mass., 1840-1860, contains four movements inspired by Transcendentalists: Emerson, Hawthorne, the Alcotts, and Thoreau. Emerson begins with a page of such explosive dissonance and overlaying of musical information that it’s no wonder people were daunted by the sonata at first. This chaos is deliberate, however, and is the key to the whole piece’s structure. Many different motivic elements are stated at once, jostling together in a clamor representing the non-linear rhetoric of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s own writing and the noisy public response to it. Concord’s second movement, the scherzo-like Hawthorne, focuses on the writer’s playfulness and imagination. Writing about the piece, Ives suggests some of the phantasmagorical elements flitting through the score: “little demons dancing around his pipe bowl; or something to do with the old hymn tune that haunts the church and sings only to those in the churchyard”. The spiritual heart of the sonata is the third movement, The Alcotts. Ives wrote of the movement of a spiritual sturdiness in the movement. “All around you, under the Concord sky, there still floats the influence of that human faith melody… reflecting an innate hоpe—а common interest in common things and common men—a tune the Concord bards are ever playing, while they pound away at the immensities with a Beethovenlike sublimity.” This could easily have been the sonata’s closing statement, but there’s still a dreamy coda: Thoreau. The surprising inclusion of a flute at the end might represent Thoreau himself playing, or an owl heard across the pond, or it could be a soul immersed in divinity at last, taken up with its fellows (“Each and All”): flowing freely with the current of Nature, no longer encumbered by thorny earth-bound questions of human sin and redemption. 

 

Maurice Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit (1908)—composed just a few years before Ives began work on his second sonata, in a very different artistic milieu— is a triptych of dark fever dreams, unsettlingly erotic, enclosing both player and audience in an otherworldly embrace as inexorable as it is intoxicating. The first movement, Ondine, is pure liquid sensuality. A nymph appears to a man at night; half-awake, he hears her disembodied voice calling to him, imploring him to join her as king of her underground realm. She sings with ethereal beauty, as alluring as the sirens from whose seductive pull Odysseus lashed himself to his own mast to save himself. In the second movement, Le Gibet, it is early evening; someone crosses a vast expanse of desert toward a village where a bell—a haunting B-flat ostinato—rings inexorably. Eventually, the hazy image in view becomes clear: it is a corpse hanging from a gallows, reddened by the setting sun. The last movement, Scarbo gives Gaspard its reputation as one of the most challenging pieces in the piano repertoire. Scarbo in Bertrand’s poem is a demonic gnome, a whirlwind of fiendish energy. He torments someone lying in bed at night by blocking the moon, scratching at the bed-curtains, and flitting around the room with inhuman speed and agility and menace. 

 

Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Sonata is a richly emotional but still formally precise work. The first movement, marked Allegro agitato, begins with a vertiginous plunge to the depths of the keyboard—no mere theatrical gesture but a true melodic motive that will be explored throughout the piece’s three movements. The initial explosion continues in one unbroken build until it exhausts itself and gives way to a pensive second theme: an orthodox chant. After a searching development that heightens our sense of breathlessness, another plunge: a dissonant bell sequence (a nod to Rachmaninoff’s Orthodox upbringing) crashes down the keyboard and rings in the recapitulation, even stormier the second time, with a climax as overwhelming as Edgar Allan Poe’s bell tower. “Leaping higher, higher, higher,/With a desperate desire … How they clang, and clash, and roar!/What a horror they outpour/On the bosom of the palpitating air!” The second movement, Non allegro, is a singing intermezzo of almost unbearably poignancy. Shane imagines the movement as the singing and rocking of a mother grieving the loss of a child. Rachmaninoff picks up this closing harmony but adds a dominant addition to kick off the final movement, marked L’istesso tempo. Immediately the plunging motive is recontextualized as a bass line in a series of discursive explorations. A sudden march-like outburst breaks through, dance-like episodes wheel joyfully, huge chordal statements raise the heart rate of player and listener, and finally a series of accelerations—a tempo, più mosso, presto—push us toward a triumphant conclusion that could be the climax of a genuine folk celebration: a ritualized, thunderous, gasping release of collective emotion.

 

For Shane, a score can act as a conduit for individual exploration—a search for enlightenment, a traversal of deep waters of spirituality, eroticism, and emotion, requiring absolute immersion and absolute humility. The rewards can be high: an unmediated certainty of the composers’ intentions for every note and the spaces between every note; a sense of rightness, even divinity, in the communion between the performer and the art itself.