Kirkpatrick was the first to play the complete Concord Sonata in a public performance, in 1939, and the first to record it, in this 1949 LP transfer of an April 1945 rendition for Columbia. In 1968, the same record company had Kirkpatrick set down a stereo version.
Reacting to one of the first public performances, the New York Herald-Tribune's Lawrence Gilman was effusive both about composer and pianist. He called the sonata "the greatest music composed by an American, and the most deeply and essentially American in impulse and implication," while adding that Kirkpatrick was "a poet and master, an unobtrusive minister of genius."
The pianist must have deeply identified with the music, which was an homage to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, the Alcotts and Henry David Thoreau, evoking the spirit of transcendentalism.
This is the second in a series of early recordings of the music of Ives. The sound is good.
