a discord sonata

I've just returned from the concert with the highly challenging modernist piece I'd been studying in detail for the last two weeks. Even though the performing edition was utterly transformed from the one I studied - and I knew this was going to be the case - all that work turned out to be very much worth the trouble.

The piece was Charles Ives's Concord Sonata, as transformed by Henry Brant into A Concord Symphony. I had the piano score in my lap during the performance. I only lost my place in the score a few times, and was always able to find it again. And I could see when particular points were about to come up, and prepare myself to hear what would happen next.

I'm so glad I did all this, because if I hadn't, the symphony would have sounded like fifty minutes of incoherent noise. As it was, it sounded like coherent noise instead.

Now to write the review.