Ives and Sessions with Patricia Travers

When Patricia Travers died several years ago, her obituary in the New York Times melodramatically termed her the "violinist who vanished."

But Travers herself did not disappear, rather she abandoned a career that had recently transitioned from child prodigy to an uncertain future as an adult soloist.

As the Times relates, "In her early 20s, for the Columbia label, she made the first complete recording of Charles Ives’s Sonata No.2 for Violin and Piano, a modern American work requiring a mature musical intelligence. Not long afterward, she disappeared."

Patricia Travers

This is the recording that the newspaper mentions. It and the Sessions Duo for Violin and Piano were taped in April 1950, but she was in fact active for at least a few years thereafter. In June 1952 Columbia had her record another modern American work, Norman Dello Joio's Variations and Capriccio, with the composer at the piano.

On the evidence of this LP, Travers was certainly up to the task of rendering the first recorded performance of Ives's characteristic sonata and Sessions's knotty Duo. Composer Arthur Berger wrote in the Saturday Review that she gives the music "the kind of treatment the big names reserve for the 

standard classics. The Sessions work, which I had always regarded as an over-restless, tense piece, is invested with just the right amount of repose - revealing intrinsic beauties I had only vaguely suspected it of having. The Ives, by contrast, which has been played in a rambling fashion, ruminating over the hymn-tune and the country-dance, takes on remarkable shape in her reading."

These works were perhaps a relief after the showpieces that typically are allotted to the child virtuoso. Perhaps remarkably, perhaps not considering what shows up on YouTube, you can see the 20-year-old Travers perform a bit of the Carmen Fantasy in a 1948 German newsreel.

Travers never did explain her "disappearance." It is left for us to speculate, and I will only note my own opinion that no one should be induced to give up their childhood and adolescence to public performance and scrutiny, which can deplete the resources of even the most well-adjusted adult.

Her cohort on this 10-inch LP is the well-known accompanist Otto Herz. The sound is excellent. This is Travers's only recording, save for the Dello Joio.

Note (November 2024): this has now been remastered in ambient stereo. The download includes complete scans and contemporary reviews.

LINK to Ives and Sessions