From weird and idiosyncratic, to slightly crazy and absolute genius – today's evaluation of the composer Charles Ives remains as multi-faceted as that of his principal work for the piano, the Concord Sonata. The four movements are based on four 19th-century American writers who were all closely connected to the small town of Concord in Massachusetts, where they set up a centre for so-called Transcendentalism. Ives doesn't draw musical portraits of the writers, whose biographies would have hardly been a source of inspiration for him. Instead, he allows himself to be guided by the feelings he experienced, roughly 50 years later, when considering their writings and the philosophy they advocated. Despite the difficult technical issues (the abandoning of bar lines for long passages, the use of chord clusters, etc.) Tzimon Barto’s interpretation is full of his renowned sensitivity and provides us with a new and impressive insight into this masterpiece of 20th-century piano literature.