Nice overview in the
Times today:
May 7, 2004
Musical Radical in a Suit and Tie
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
IT'S mildly surprising to realize that the brilliant, cantankerous Yankee composer Charles Ives died only 50 years ago. For he flourished a century ago and gradually faded from musical sight after a heart attack in 1918. Not that he was totally idle in later years. He continued to tinker with his music — perhaps even, it has been suggested, inserting bold strokes calculated to make earlier works seem more innovative than they actually were.
Still, the music, however it came down to us, remains blindingly original. And yes, it was ahead of its time, though not so much for reveling in complexity and dissonance as for pointing toward a postmodern synthesis of popular and classical styles. But the music was also behind its time, for it was only in Ives's day, with the rise of modernism, that the worlds of popular and classical music began to split irreconcilably.
So an Ives year, an opportunity for reconsideration, is surely welcome, however scattered the observances. On Tuesday, the New York Philharmonic begins a three-week festival, "Ives: An American Original." True, amid a context of Debussy, Varèse, Copland and others, Ives's own works are relatively thin on the ground, and only one of the four numbered symphonies is to be presented: the Fourth, next weekend. (The Juilliard School's weeklong Focus Festival offered two in January.) But in fairness to the Philharmonic, it is also true that Ives's thorny creations don't necessarily benefit from quantity. Each needs negative space: quiet and air around it.
In any case, the classical music critics of The New York Times are filling the gaps with recommendations of favorite Ives CD's. Ives's music is best approached with open ears and a stout heart. In fact, maybe that weak heart was why Ives had to give up composing. JAMES R. OESTREICH
Here are some favorite Charles Ives recordings of the classical-music critics of The New York Times. Availability is hard to determine in the current state of the market. Most of the recordings here can be found on Amazon.com or in major record stores. CD's range in price from $6.98 to $16.98 for one CD to $33.99 for a two-CD set.
Anthony Tommasini
SONGS. Jan DeGaetani, mezzo-soprano; Gilbert Kalish, pianist (Nonesuch 9 71325-2).
PIANO SONATA NO. 2, SONGS. Pierre-Laurent Aimard, pianist; Susan Graham, mezzo-soprano (Warner Classics 2564 60297-2).
STRING QUARTETS (2). Lydian String Quartet (Centaur CRC 2069).
VIOLIN SONATAS (4). Gregory Fulkerson, violinist; Robert Shannon, pianist (Bridge BCD 9024; two CD's).
"AN AMERICAN JOURNEY" ("THREE PLACES IN NEW ENGLAND," OTHER WORKS). Thomas Hampson, baritone; San Francisco Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas (BMG 09026-63703-2).
ALTHOUGH Ives was a flinty Yankee, he had a soft spot for vernacular American hymns, marches, dances, band music, parlor songs and ditties. Yet when you hear how he sometimes treats these idioms in his works — mixing weird modern harmonies into hymn evocations, discombobulating the pulse of a march — it's easy to assume he was being irreverent.
Not at all. I think he loved this music so much that he claimed the right to have fun with it. I prefer performances of Ives in which his respect for vernacular American music comes through, whatever the compositional manipulations.
That is why I love the 1976 recording of 17 songs performed by the exquisite mezzo-soprano Jan DeGaetani and the musicianly pianist Gilbert Kalish. From the first song, "The Housatonic at Stockbridge," the performers embrace Ives's radicalism: the blurry and astringently dissonant piano chords that seem to anticipate the atmospheric harmonies of Gyorgy Ligeti; the near-static rhythmic flow. They capture the unhinged wildness and harmonic density of "Majority," an apocalyptic call to the masses. But they also reveal a wistful fondness for the vernacular music Ives pays homage to: funny patter songs and tender anthems. "Memories" offers the singer's melancholic recollections of a common little tune she used to hear her uncle hum.
My newest favorite Ives recording is about to be released: a performance of the daunting "Concord" Piano Sonata by Pierre Laurent-Aimard preceded by a smartly chosen, elegantly sung set of 17 songs with Mr. Aimard accompanying the mezzo-soprano Susan Graham. Mr. Aimard spent his formative years playing cutting-edge contemporary music. Not surprisingly his performance makes the "Concord" sound more path-breaking than ever. You hear premonitions of Messiaen in the cluster chords strewn through the fitful "Emerson" movement, though Mr. Aimard, a staggering technician, voices the clusters with a lucidity that seems to make each note audible. Yet who would have expected this intellectual Frenchman to have such affinity for "Jesus, Lover of My Soul"?
If you doubt that Ives the experimenter was also a gifted craftsman, listen to the First String Quartet, written when he was a sophomore at Yale. The opening movement, a stately fugue with a theme adapted from "Missionary Hymn," is impressively wrought. The whole quartet abounds with imagination and hints of what was to come. The performance to have is the Lydian String Quartet's, recorded in 1988, on a rewarding disc that includes a bracing account of the more mature and out-there Second Quartet.
Though the four Ives symphonies are large-swathed, jam-packed and astonishing experiments in stylistic fusion, I prefer the stylistic fusions in his four affectingly intimate sonatas for violin and piano. They appear in a two-disc set in dynamic performances by the violinist Gregory Fulkerson and the pianist Robert Shannon.
Not to neglect the orchestral works, I recommend "An American Journey," an adventurous program recorded live by Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony. It offers various short and longer orchestral compositions, including a gripping account of "Three Places in New England," with choruses and songs thrown in for fun. Why not?
Allan Kozinn
"NEW ENGLAND HOLIDAYS" SYMPHONY, "THE UNANSWERED QUESTION," "CENTRAL PARK IN THE DARK." Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas ( Sony Classical MK 42381).
SYMPHONIES NOS. 2, 3. New York Philharmonic, conducted by Leonard Bernstein (Sony Classical SMK 60202).
"THREE PLACES IN NEW ENGLAND," ORCHESTRAL SETS NOS. 1, 2. Cleveland Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Christoph von Dohnanyi (with works by Carl Ruggles and Ruth Crawford Seeger; Decca 289 443 776-2).
STRING QUARTETS (2); SCHERZO. Emerson String Quartet (with Barber's String Quartet; Deutsche Grammophon 435 864-2).
VIOLIN SONATAS (4). Gregory Fulkerson, violinist; Robert Shannon, pianist (Bridge BCD 9024; two CD's).
NEARLY all the music here is steeped in Ives's signature move, the layering of incompatible themes, rhythms and textures, all tugging relentlessly at the listener's ear. Lush, late-Romantic scoring, of a kind that shows the degree to which Ives absorbed the language of Wagner, Dvorak and Tchaikovsky, invariably gives way to — or is overlaid with — fragments ripped from hymn tunes, patriotic songs, spirituals and folk melodies.
Sometimes they are quoted straight, sometimes in comic dissonances meant to evoke the performance level of a small-town wind band. Whatever other innovations Ives is credited with, one can also hear the roots of Spike Jones's and Peter Schickele's zany quotation works here, and hip-hop D.J.'s, whether they know it or not, are indebted to him, too.
Leonard Bernstein did much to drag Ives's music into the mainstream, and his recordings of the four symphonies continue to persuade. His 1958 recording of the Second Symphony moves with disarming ease from the lush, original string writing that opens the work to Ives's quotations from "Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean," "Turkey in the Straw" and "America the Beautiful" (for starters) and back again.
The Third, more sober and overtly nostalgic, is not without its quirks, and Bernstein, in this 1965 recording, plays it as lovingly as he would a Brahms symphony. Included as a bonus is a Bernstein lecture, a suitably colorful tour of the Second Symphony, recorded in 1966.
Michael Tilson Thomas took up the Ives cause where Bernstein left off, and few conductors have performed this music so eloquently. A particularly fine example in Mr. Thomas's superb series of Ives discs for Sony Classical (and, more recently, RCA) is a 1986 collection that shows Ives at his zaniest ("Washington's Birthday," with its lively barn dances and jew's-harp solo, and "The Fourth of July," with its explosions of competing parade bands) and his most sublime (the magnificently brooding "Unanswered Question," offered in two subtly different versions).
In "Three Places in New England," Ives immortalizes historical sites that otherwise seem obscure now. "The St. Gaudens in Boston Common" is a warm-hued tribute to the 54th Massachussets Volunteer Infantry, the first black Union Army regiment to fight in the Civil War. "Putnam's Camp, Redding, Conn." is a typically Ivesian glimpse at the Revolutionary War, complete with snippets of "Yankee Doodle" and, anachronistically, a Sousa march. And "The Housatonic at Stockbridge," one of Ives's most masterly tone paintings, evokes the currents within the large, slow-moving river and the sights and sounds on its banks. Few European conductors have been able to make much of American music, but Christoph von Dohnanyi's recordings of Ives, Ruggles and Crawford Seeger show to what extent he has absorbed the music's style and spirit.
In his chamber works, too seldom heard, Ives used elements like those that animate his orchestral scores, but the more constricted coloration in some ways yields a more coherent picture. Gregory Fulkerson's accounts of the violin sonatas, focused, polished and energetic, haven't been bettered.
And the Emerson String Quartet, named for one of Ives's literary heroes, plays the quartet works fully in whichever spirit is required at the moment: quirkily devotional in the hymn-filled First Quartet ("From the Salvation Army") or pranksterish in a humorous Scherzo (which quotes "The Streets of Cairo," known to classic cartoon watchers around the world as a belly-dance theme).
Jeremy Eichler
PIANO SONATA NO. 2, SONGS. Pierre-Laurent Aimard, pianist; Susan Graham, mezzo-soprano (Warner Classics 2564 60297-2).
"AN AMERICAN JOURNEY" ("THREE PLACES IN NEW ENGLAND," OTHER WORKS). Thomas Hampson, baritone; San Francisco Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas (BMG 09026-63703-2).
SYMPHONIES NOS. 2, 3. New York Philharmonic, conducted by Leonard Bernstein (Sony Classical SMK 60202).
STRING QUARTETS (2), SCHERZO. Emerson String Quartet (with Barber's String Quartet; Deutsche Grammophon 435 864-2).
IT'S tempting to imagine Charles Ives as a sort of musical Thoreau, living in the wilderness, philosophizing about art and wending his way into town occasionally for a warm meal and a few lively tunes from the village band. The real Ives did plenty of philosophizing, but he also worked in insurance, which allowed him the distance to be fiercely critical of the conservative music world. He wrote, for example, about composers' being "drugged with an overdose of habit-forming sounds," and he once commented that "beauty in music is too often confused with something that lets the ears lie back in an easy chair."
There are no easy chairs provided with the beauty in Ives's Piano Sonata No. 2 ("Concord"). Magisterially sprawling and almost recklessly visionary, the music is divided into four movements inspired by Thoreau, yes, but also Emerson, Hawthorne and the Alcotts. The French new-music specialist Pierre-Laurent Aimard gives this work a wonderful reading on a disc due out next week. His approach is vigorous yet pliable, and he uses his fearless technique to draw amazing colors from the heart of Ives's cosmic swirl. On the same album, Susan Graham sings radiantly through a collection of Ives's ingeniously quirky and often tender songs.
If you're looking for your first Ives purchase, the next two choices stand out as good introductions. Despite the bland title, "An American Journey," with Michael Tilson Thomas leading the San Francisco Symphony, packs a wide selection of Ives's most vivid and characterful music onto a single disc, from a smattering of songs (persuasively delivered by Thomas Hampson) to orchestral landmarks like "Three Places in New England" and "The Unanswered Question." Mr. Thomas has his orchestra in top form.
Another sensible place to start is with Leonard Bernstein, whose eloquence in championing Ives was not limited to the vibrant, incisive recordings of the Second and Third Symphonies here. The disc also includes an enthusiastic lecture in which Bernstein lucidly unpacks the Second Symphony, showing just how Ives fused his disparate materials — patriotic American songs, marching-band tunes and quotations from the classical repertory — into a brilliant collage.
In his Second String Quartet, Ives transforms the same essential mixture of Old and New World ingredients into a fierce instrumental shouting match. The second movement is titled "Arguments," and we can guess some of the burning questions at hand: What should American music be? Should it draw inspiration from the grand European tradition or from sources closer to home? The Emerson String Quartet conducts the debate with zeal yet also with ample refinement and a warmly resolute sound. In the finale, "The Call of the Mountains," debate gives way to wilderness tone painting, at once rugged and serene, like an Ansel Adams photograph for string quartet.
Also on the disc is a fine reading of the more conservative First Quartet. Even when Ives's music sounds traditional or Romantic, it still sounds like nobody else's. He figured out the route to iconoclasm early on; then it took the music world decades to realize what it had in its midst.
Anne Midgette
SYMPHONIES NOS. 1, 4. Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas (with hymns used in the Fourth Symphony; Sony Classical SK 44939).
SYMPHONIES NOS. 2, 3. New York Philharmonic, conducted by Leonard Bernstein (Sony Classical SMK 60202).
SYMPHONY NO. 3, "THE UNANSWERED QUESTION," OTHER WORKS. Northern Sinfonia, conducted by James Sinclair (Naxos 8.559087).
VIOLIN SONATAS (4). Curt Thompson, violinist; Rodney Waters, pianist (Naxos 8.559119).
SONGS. Jan DeGaetani, mezzo-soprano; Gilbert Kalish, pianist (Nonesuch 9 71325-2).
CHARLES IVES is stereotyped as a rugged American individualist. Well and good. Henry James, the novelist, was an American individualist, too. The parallel is not all that misplaced, because Ives and his musical language were steeped in a lush, Romantic, European sensibility that the label "rugged" belies.
The stereotype, like another epithet often applied to Ives, "ahead of his time," flags the composer's rigorously conducted experiments into realms beyond tonality, where his shifting note patterns either ache to settle into the comfort of a home base that is denied them or drift with near resignation across the keyless expanse of a brave new world. But it doesn't adequately take into account the Brahmsian richness and sweetness of tone and phrase, or the tug of nostalgia that throbs in the contrast between the familiar (from hymn tunes to actual quotes from Brahms) and the unknown.
Sandwiched between the second and fourth movements of his fourth and final symphony, his greatest and his most avant-garde, is a measured fugue, like a final harbor before the open ocean. Michael Tilson Thomas includes that fugue as a stand-alone piece on the Ives disc he made with the San Francisco Symphony, placing it as a pretty bauble in the context of a lighter album; but my money is on his insightful recording of the whole symphony with the Chicago Symphony.
The Fourth is a work of wild extremes, now exploding with crashing force, now ebbing into sung choruses, and Mr. Thomas pulls off the difficult balancing act of letting it rip while keeping a light touch, making the contrasts particularly vivid. His mentor Leonard Bernstein was another famous Ives champion; Bernstein's 1958 reading of the Second Symphony with the New York Philharmonic is full of characteristic sizzle.
Ives is a little clumsy, for all his urbanity, and it's interesting to hear his music filtered through different styles of orchestral playing: in Bernstein, any rawness stems from extrovert emotion, but the playing is warmly polished. In the Northern Sinfonia's excellent Third Symphony under James Sinclair, the rawness is in the playing itself, emphasizing coltish rough edges. Even better, if anything, are the readings of other orchestral works, including "The Unanswered Question" and "Central Park in the Dark."
Another hole in one from Naxos, perfectly demonstrating this composer's spicy, earthy rawness and appeal, is the set of violin sonatas — at once Romantic and defiantly nonconformist — with Curt Thompson and Rodney Waters.
Drawn to musical illustration (most of his music was programmatic) and regularly incorporating song and hymn phrases in his orchestral works, Ives, not surprisingly, was a gifted songwriter. Jan DeGaetani is equally gifted; her instrument is not in itself imposing, but she inhabits these songs like no one else, with a quiet warmth that inflates even the briefest snatch of melody. Her recording with Gilbert Kalish remains a benchmark.
James R. Oestreich
"UNIVERSE SYMPHONY," ORCHESTRAL SET NO. 2, "THE UNANSWERED QUESTION." Cincinnati Philharmonia Orchestra, conducted by Gerhard Samuel (Centaur CRC 2205).
PIANO SONATA NO. 2. Gilbert Kalish, pianist; Samuel Baron, flutist; John Graham, violist (Nonesuch 9 71337-2).
"EMERSON" CONCERTO, SYMPHONY NO. 1. Alan Feinberg, pianist; National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland, conducted by James Sinclair (Naxos 9.559175).
PIANO STUDIES, OTHER WORKS. Donald Berman, pianist (with Carl Ruggles's "Evocations"; Composers Recordings CD 811).
"THREE PLACES IN NEW ENGLAND," OTHER WORKS. Orchestra New England, conducted by James Sinclair (Koch International Classics 3-7025-2).
WHILE seconding (and thirding) some of the recommendations elsewhere on this page, especially those involving Leonard Bernstein, Michael Tilson Thomas and the Emerson String Quartet, I'm inclined to explore byways in the Ives repertory.
As if some of Ives's finished works didn't convey mystery enough, there are also many fragments and sketches to occupy Ives scholars. For a long time, the most tantalizing was the "Universe Symphony," which the composer Larry Austin puzzled through for two decades. On the basis of notations and sketches, verbal as well as musical, he finally produced a realization of the work in 1993. Gerhard Samuel recorded it with students of the College-Conservatory of Music at the University of Cincinnati a year later.
It would be rash to say that Mr. Austin achieved anything like what Ives might have had in his unfathomable mind, but the conception is compelling. Accumulated from fugitive bits and scraps over a long crescendo, the music progresses from nothingness through chaos to earth and the firmament, and finally to heaven. Through almost the whole of it a bell tolls hauntingly, seemingly heralding the arrival of life, then mediating between life and afterlife. It's not like any other piece you've heard.
To add another "Concord" Piano Sonata to the mix, Gilbert Kalish's vintage performance, from 1976, is notable in itself. It is doubly so for including flute and viola, as Ives suggests, in the merest cameo roles.
And from the first movement of the "Concord" Sonata derives another recent addition to the Ives repertory, the "Emerson" Concerto (or "Emerson Overture," as Ives called it): an expansion for piano and orchestra left in an unfinished draft by Ives and completed by the Ives scholar David G. Porter. It comes in a finely honed reading from 2002, with Alan Feinberg as soloist and James Sinclair leading the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland.
The outsize "Concord" tends to overshadow Ives's other piano music. But in 1999, Donald Berman issued a delectable collection called "The Unknown Ives." It consists of short works, mainly studies, that Ives presented to the pianist John Kirkpatrick (later Mr. Berman's teacher) in 1938.
As you might expect from this gnarliest of composers, these are not mere bagatelles. The "Three-Page Sonata" and some of the studies alternate lyricism with angularity. But there are also moments of sheer entertainment, as when Stravinsky's "Petrouchka" merges with the old ditty "Hello, My Baby" in the Study No. 23. (Shouldn't some pianist play it as an encore to a program ending with Stravinsky's Three Movements From "Petrouchka"?) Of course, the ditty wasn't so old when Ives began work on the study in 1912, and "Petrouchka" had appeared just a year before.
Mr. Sinclair followed in 2000 with a collection of out-of-the-way orchestral works, some of them — as with the Berman selections — recorded for the first time. The entertainment quotient is higher here, with the "Country Band " March, "Set of Four Ragtime Dances" and "Yale-Princeton Football Game." But there is also Ives at his most substantial and quintessential: "Three Places in New England," in Ives's own version for small orchestra. It's enough to make your ears spin.
― hstencil (hstencil), Friday, 7 May 2004 13:48 (twenty-one years ago)