Ives reviews
The Children's Hour
Gareth Brynmor John (baritone), William Vann (piano) (Champs Hill)
Beach • R Clarke • Ives: Piano Trios
Gould Piano Trio (Resonus)
Ives: Symphonies Nos 1-4
Los Angeles Philharmonic/Gustavo Dudamel, et al (DG)
A Simple Song: works by Bernstein, Copland, Mahler et al
Anne Sofie von Otter; Bengt Forsberg, Sharon Bezaly, et al (BIS)
Ives: Symphonies Nos 3 & 4, etc
San Francisco Symphony Orchestra/Michael Tilson Thomas, et al (SFS Media)
Andrew Davis conducts the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra in a performance of Charles Ives' Symphonies Nos 3 & 4
Revisiting the pioneering 1960s recordings of Charles Ives’s music makes you realise the distance travelled in performing this maverick’s unique brand of Americana. No conductor now would paint Orchestral Set No. 2’s opening colours with the uncouth clarity of Morton Gould (1967), or crown his euphonious Symphony No. 3 with clumsily booming taped bells (Harold Farberman, 1968). Even the Fourth Symphony’s anarchic fireworks have acquired some finesse.
Ives
Charles Ives’s collages, composed at the turn of the last century, present cut ’n’ paste tales of celebration, tradition and ideals. This is the third disc of his works released by the Seattle Symphony Orchestra and their music director Ludovic Morlot. It comprises concert performances recorded at the orchestra’s Washington home, Benaroya Hall, and is distributed by the ensemble’s enterprising in-house label, Seattle Symphony Media.
The Seattle Symphony play Ives 'The Unanswered Question' and more
Charles Ives’s Fourth Symphony is a formidable prospect, with its vast orchestral and choral demands, its complex textures, in places requiring three conductors to pilot different rhythmic strands, and its multiple textual options to be resolved. (The recent Critical Edition weighs in at around two kilos.) Ludovic Morlot is clearly a master of the material and of his excellent Seattle Symphony forces.
Sir Andrew Davies and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra play Ives
The second volume of Sir Andrew Davis’s Ives series centres on memories and evocations of the composer’s native region: in the four pieces which make up the engaging if asymmetrical New England Holidays Symphony; and in the three movements of the perfectly formed triptych Three Places in New England. The exceptions are the Two Contemplations for small orchestras: Central Park in the Dark a New York scene, The Unanswered Question originally called ‘a Cosmic Landscape’.
Ives • Berg • Webern
Perhaps no other Russian concert pianist today commands quite the range of Alexei Lubimov, all the way from early music on period instrument to Stockhausen, John Cage – and, not least, Charles Ives. This recording of the Concord Sonata (No. 2) – Ives’s vast tribute to the ‘Transcendentalist’ worthies of that New England town – dates from 1997.
Copland, Ives,Morten Lauridsen etc
The two main works here were both written in the mid-to-late 1940s, on the East and West Coasts respectively. Copland’s In the Beginning, on words from Genesis, was designed for student mixed voices, and the New College boy trebles can’t quite encompass its full range of dynamics and expression from whispered pp to the final ringing ffff. But this challenging piece is done with impressive precision of tuning and attack, proper care for the text, and clear projection of the solo part by the young mezzo-soprano Katherine Bond.
Ives; Bernstein; Moore; Griffes; Beach
This is a promisingly unhackneyed American selection, opening with a well-varied Ives group, followed by three Bernstein songs including the touching Greeting on the birth of his son (which later went into Arias and Barcarolles), and ending with rarities by the Impressionist Charles Griffes and the late-Romantic Amy Beach. Disappointing, though, are Ben Moore’s songs, including settings of three from James Joyce’s Chamber Music: these have very singable melodies, but are unimaginatively four-square in phrasing and unadventurous in harmony.
Ives: General William Booth Enters into Heaven; The Housatonic at Stockbridge; Ich grolle nicht,
Charles Ives was a great song writer, capable of encapsulating emotion, evocation, experiment or a good joke in a page or two with consummate artistry and utter individuality. This generous selection of 31 songs, most chosen from the volume of 114 he published at his own expense in 1922, ranges from early ballads and settings of German and French poems to squibs such as The Cage and 1, 2, 3, intense meditations such as The Things Our Fathers Loved and Tom Sails Away, and the epic General William Booth Enters into Heaven.
Ives: Piano Sonata No. 2 (Concord); The Celestial Railroad; Varied Air and Variations; Transcriptions from Emerson No. 1
Charles Ives’s Concord Sonata is one of those pieces that rarely get downright bad performances. Pianists lacking the technique and stamina to negotiate its ferocious demands, or the intellect and patience to disentangle its notational complexities and shape its sprawling forms, normally just leave it alone. Steven Mayer’s performance is certainly not a bad one: he has all the requisite technique and intellect, and he’s especially successful in the work’s oases of quiet simplicity.
Ives, Barber
Charles Ives’s massive Concord Sonata has been well served on disc this year, the 50th anniversary of his death. Pierre-Laurent Aimard’s magisterial account on Warner has the bonus of Susan Graham in a generous group of songs (reviewed in Choral & Song in June). Steven Mayer’s Naxos performance (reviewed in August) is by no means negligible, and has some fascinating and relevant couplings. Now comes Marc-André Hamelin, with the most spectacular pianism of all, yet placed firmly at the service of the music.
Ives: The Celestial Country; Silence Unaccompanied
Of all Charles Ives’s compositions, The Celestial Country comes closest to sounding like the work of a true primitive artist, a Grandma Moses of music. In this sacred cantata, first performed in 1902 at the Manhattan church where Ives was organist, the conventional language of hymn tunes and salon music is sometimes heard unalloyed, sometimes subverted by unexpected harmonies or rhythms, and occasionally, in some weirdly dissonant instrumental interludes, abandoned altogether. The overall effect is at once amusing and surprisingly moving.
Ives: Symphony No. 3 (The Camp Meeting); Washington's Birthday; The Unanswered Question; Central Park in the Dark; Country Band March; Overture and March 1776
Charles Ives’s Third Symphony is a modest, lovable piece, a sequence of three hymn-tune preludes evoking an old-time New England gospel meeting. James Sinclair, a leading Ives expert, directs it with obvious affection and authority. Of the discordant ‘shadow lines’ which Ives wrote in various passages, crossed out, then later wanted reinstated, he includes some but not others: hardly a scholarly approach, but the selection is an effective one.
Ives, Barber, Harris, Ruggles, Cowell, Glass, Carter & Thompson
Even if they make it from shrink-wrapping to machine, discs of music for brass usually occupy my loading tray very briefly. Something to do with the fact that so much brass music concentrates more on idiom than substance. But from the very opening track of this re-release – Ives’s upliftingly cacaphonic From the Steeples and the Mountains – the London Gabrieli Brass Ensemble demands close attention. Pieces by seven other giants of 20th-century American music, from Ruggles to Carter, some obviously more radical than others, complete the disc.
Ives: Three Places in New England; New England Holidays; They are There!
Charles Ives liked to think of himself as a tough guy, uncompromising in his willingness to capture the world around him as he heard and remembered it, in all its rugged dissonance and chaos. But ironically, the very pictorial vividness of Ives also distances him from us, since Ives’s America is as foreign to present-day Americans as it is to non-Americans. Ives’s ‘Three Places’ are unrecognisable as the commercial New England of today; his ‘Holidays’ are anachronistic (Lincoln’s birthday, for instance, has been combined with Washington’s as an excuse for a three-day winter weekend).
Ives: Symphony No. 3 (The Camp Meeting); Three Places in New England; Central Park in the Dark; The Unanswered Question
Charles Ives was a pioneering salesman of life insurance, who believed in educating his clients so that they would know, rather than have to be told, the cover they needed. But as a composer his innovative use of polyrhythms, atonality and other advanced techniques won him only posthumous glory as a precursor of the 20th-century American tradition.
Reger/Ives/Brahms
Poor Reger, his star has definitely waned. Not that it was ever high in this country, where he has always suffered the reputation of a turgidly Teutonic composer. There’s some irony there, since his lifelong ambition was to compose music of Mozartian clarity and lightness. Certainly, his Mozart Variations are scored with immense subtlety and delicacy, and they treat the siciliano-like theme (taken from the first movement of the well-known Turkish Rondo piano sonata) with extraordinary inventiveness and wit.
Clarke, Ives
Rebecca Clarke (1886-1979) was a pupil of Stanford, but clearly responsive to more up-to-date influences, notably that of impressionism. Her 1921 Trio is beautifully written and well constructed on cyclic lines, with some striking moments of harmonic adventurousness. The Bekova Sisters play it sympathetically, though sometimes a little languorously, and with a few patches of insecure intonation. They add the first recording of a Szymanowski-like nocturne for violin and piano, and an ingenious Lullaby for string duo.
Ives: Works for violin & piano (complete)
Charles Ives’s violin sonatas are quite unlike anything else which was being written in the early years of the 20th century. They are an astonishing synthesis of the idiom of Dvorák and his American followers, the Revivalist hymns and ragtime tunes which surrounded the composer in his school and college years, and the inquiring cast of mind of a stubborn individualist determined not to pander to the taste of the time.
Ives: Piano Sonata No. 1; Piano Sonata No. 2 (Concord); Three-Page Sonata; Study No. 2; Study No. 9; Study No. 20; Study No. 21; Study No. 22; Study No. 23; Five Take-Offs; Waltz-Rondo
This is a most desirable disc. Even more than his orchestral works or songs, the piano works of Charles Ives demonstrate the extraordinary and compelling originality of a composer who was truly ahead of his time. For instance, not allowing convention or practicality to constrict his creativity in the Piano Sonata No. 2 (‘Concord, Mass., 1840-1860’), Ives includes a part for flute and a couple of bars for viola as well as large clusters to be played by a board. Such an approach seems more akin to experimental works of the Sixties rather than a piece completed in 1912.