Mead’s no-nonsense performances of Charles Ives’s two full-scale piano sonatas- the first, composed between 1902 and 1920, and the massive Concorde Sonata, began immediately afterwards – are naturally the focal points of his survey. But he also includes the terse and muscular Three-Page Sonata, the Five Take-Offs (a mixture of parody and radical experiment), and a selection of the studies in which Ives tried out techniques and material that would find their way into his larger-scale compositions.

Mead has no problems with the formidable technical difficulties many of these pieces present; the massive accumulations of notes, the cross rhythms and lightning switches of mood. But his sound is sometimes monochrome, and the recorded sound rather claustrophobic.