Steven Mayer has performed the fiendishly difficult solos of Art Tatum alongside Mozart, Liszt and Ives worldwide. Winner of the Grand Prix du Disque Liszt for his world première recordings of Liszt’s De Profundis and Concerto Op. Posth. with the London Symphony Orchestra (ASV), Mayer performed with the world-renowned Wiener Akademie at the 2015 International Liszt Festival at Liszt’s birthplace in Raiding.

Mayer has appeared with the Leipzig Gewandhaus, the Prague Symphony under Jiří Bělohlávek, the San Francisco Symphony under Herbert Blomstedt and Edo De Waart, the Rotterdam Philharmonic under James Conlon, the Minnesota Orchestra under Leonard Slatkin and the Boston Pops under Keith Lockhart.

His Art Tatum album for Naxos (8.559130) won wide praise, as have Ives’ Concord Sonata (Naxos 8.559127), The Liszt-Thalberg Duel (ASV) and Reger’s Piano Concerto (Leonarda). Following the release of Mayer’s recording of Liszt Wagner Transcriptions (Naxos 8.570562), he performed a recital on Wagner’s own piano at the composer’s villa in Tribschen in Switzerland.

Mayer has been Professor at the Manhattan School of Music and the International Keyboard Institute and Festival at Mannes in New York and the University of Denver’s Lamont School of Music.

The American composer Charles Ives learned a great deal from his bandmaster father, not least a love of the music of Bach. At the same time he was exposed to a variety of very American musical influences, later reflected in his own idiosyncratic compositions. Ives was educated at Yale and made a career in insurance, reserving his activities as a composer for his leisure hours. Ironically, by the time that his music had begun to arouse interest, his own inspiration and energy as a composer had waned, so that for the last 30 years of his life he wrote little, while his reputation grew.

Orchestral Music

The symphonies of Ives include music essentially American in inspiration and adventurous in structure and texture, collages of Americana, expressed in a musical idiom that makes use of complex polytonality (the use of more than one key or tonality at the same time) and rhythm. The Third Symphony, for small orchestra, reflects much of Ives’s own background, carrying the explanatory title The Camp Meeting and movement titles ‘Old Folks Gatherin’’, ‘Children’s Day’ and ‘Communion’. The Fourth Symphony includes a number of hymns and Gospel songs, and his so-called Orchestral Set No. 1, otherwise known as Three Places in New England, depicts the three places of the title.

Chamber Music

The first of the two string quartets of Ives has the characteristic title From the Salvation Army and is based on earlier organ compositions, while the fourth of his four violin sonatas depicts Children’s Day at the Camp Meeting.

Keyboard Music

Much of the earlier organ music written by Ives from the time of his student years, when he served as organist in a number of churches, found its way into later compositions. The second of his two piano sonatas, Concord, Mass. 1840–60, has the characteristic movement titles ‘Emerson’, ‘Hawthorne’, ‘The Alcotts’ and ‘Thoreau’—a very American literary celebration.

Vocal and Choral Music

Ives wrote a number of psalm settings, part-songs and verse settings for unison voices and orchestra. In his many solo songs he set verses ranging from Shakespeare, Goethe and Heine to Whitman and Kipling, with a number of texts of his own creation. Relatively well-known songs by Ives include Shall we gather at the river, The Cage and The Side-Show.