Ives Sets for Chamber Orchestra, Nos 1-10; Set for Theatre Orchestra Orchestra New England/James Sinclair Naxos 8.559917 68:15 mins
From ditty to dirge, hymn to chaotic hurrah, Ives’s Sets for Chamber Orchestra are a treasure trove of riches in miniature, arguably best showcasing – of all his astonishing output – his prodigious imagination. This invaluable recording from pre-eminent Ives expert and conductor James Sinclair with Orchestra New England brings together, for the first time, the composer’s complete chamber sets, including premieres of several new editions and realisations by Sinclair.
Performed with exuberance alongside the Set for Theatre Orchestra, it’s a suitably discombobulating yet always clear and cohesive voyage into Ives’s singular music-philosophical mind. Ever practical, he was predisposed on many levels to value the sacred and secular community traditions which profoundly suffuse these sets as they do all his music.
In Ivesian parlance, a ‘set’ is a collection of independent pieces, put together under the sometimes loose and often enigmatic umbrella of a shared programmatic or musical character. Mining his own material, in keeping with his extensive borrowing of hymns, marching tunes and more, most of the constituent works here are based on his own songs. Some, too, recur in more than one guise, in effective homage to the flexible instrumentation of local theatre orchestras. Of many highlights, the four versions of ‘The Indians’ (Sets 2, 5, 8 and 10) are a cornucopia of invention: poignantly nostalgic and proudly defiant in illumination of Charles Sprague’s heartfelt poem. Set No. 9 is essential listening: it includes the original version of The Unanswered Question, whose ghostly unfolding points to Ives’s ever-underlying metaphysical expansiveness.
Steph Power