NY Times Article by Jeremy Denk Celebrating CHARLES IVES' 150th Birthday

[HutchFan]

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/18/arts/music/charles-ives-150.html?unlocked_article_code=1.TE4.9PTM.JxNpmapT_FQl&smid=url-share

Well worth a read!

Edited October 18 by HutchFan

[soulpope]

Thnx for sharing 👍 ....

[HutchFan]

I've just discovered that Sony Masterworks is releasing a big box set to celebrate Ives' 150th birthday:

Per the press release:

In celebration of the Ives 150th anniversary year, Sony Classical proudly presents two of the most authoritative collections ever released of works by this eccentric, prophetic American genius. The 22-CD box set Charles Ives – The Anthology 1945–1976, which will be released on November 29, 2024, brings together the entire discography amassed over three decades by Columbia Masterworks, the label that dedicated itself with unmatched zeal to bringing his visionary works to public attention. The important albums made by RCA Victor during those years are also included in this, the largest and most comprehensive Ives compilation ever issued.

 

In January 1939 – twelve years after Ives had stopped composing new works altogether – John Kirkpatrick, the pianist who would become the composer’s friend and leading collaborator, played his Second Sonata (1916–1919), subtitled “Concord, Mass., 1840–1860” at New York’s Town Hall. It was the first public performance of Ives’s ferociously demanding masterpiece, and it garnered the first review of his music by a prominent, mainstream critic, who hailed the work as “the greatest music composed by an American”.

This was the turning point: “the artist and the work that launched the Ives revolution”, as it came to be known. In 1945, Kirkpatrick recorded the “Concord” Sonata for Columbia, which released it on 78s in 1948 and on vinyl a year later. Two decades later, the pianist made the celebrated stereo LP version of his painstakingly revised edition. Both of these still definitive recordings are in Sony’s new Ives “Anthology”.

In 1949, another outstanding interpreter of American music, William Masselos, gave another long overdue première, Ives’s remarkable First Piano Sonata (1909–21). A year later Masselos recorded it for Columbia, then he remade it in stereo for RCA Victor in 1966. Once again, a single artist’s two benchmarks, though in this case quite different, readings – the later one rather less reverential, more rhapsodic – are included in the new set.

Ives’s breakthrough as an orchestral composer finally came in 1946, when his Third Symphony “The Camp Meeting” (1901–12) was played in New York – the first time he had ever heard any of his symphonies performed complete. The next year it won him the prestigious Pulitzer Prize. In 1951, his Second Symphony (1907–09) had its première, with Leonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall. It was the first time that Ives, by then 77 years old, heard one of his major orchestral compositions played to his own satisfaction. Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic recorded the symphony in 1958, Columbia released it in 1960 along with an invaluable 13-minute bonus record of Bernstein talking about Ives and the symphony’s musical quotations.

During the 1960s, when the posthumous “Ives Revolution” was in full swing, Bernstein recorded the Third Symphony and the symphony of “New England Holidays”. In 1965, Ives’s profoundly searching Fourth Symphony, which Aaron Copland termed “an astonishing conception in every way”, had its première in 1965, with Leopold Stokowski conducting the American Symphony – a Grammy-winning milestone in American music history. In the same year, Morton Gould, conducting the Chicago Symphony for RCA, made the first recording of Ives’s First Symphony, begun when he was a student at Yale and still clearly in the European tradition. It also won a Grammy.

Not to be outdone, Eugene Ormandy jumped on the Ives bandwagon in Philadelphia, recording the first three symphonies, the “Holidays” and the beloved orchestral set Three Places in New England (the last-named work twice!) between 1964 and 1974. In that year, in London, José Serebrier, a co-conductor with Stokowski of the hugely complex Fourth’s première, recorded a version edited for a single conductor. The New York Times called the performance “stunning” and praised it for “extraordinary control and textural clarity”. Every one of these classic performances by Ormandy, Bernstein, Stokowski and Serebrier can be found in the Sony Ives “Anthology”.

Ives’s more than 150 songs rank among his finest achievements. 24 were recorded in 1969 by soprano Evelyn Lear and baritone Thomas Stewart, with Ives specialist Alan Mandel at the piano. This is the album’s first outing on CD. The greatest of the songs is the stirring General William Booth Enters into Heaven, now more familiar in the arrangement for bass, chorus and chamber orchestra. That version was part of the Gregg Smith Singers’ acclaimed 1966 album of Ives’s choral works, reissued in this set. Of his many chamber works, probably the best known are Ives’s two String Quartets, included here in the Juilliard String Quartet’s unsurpassed 1967 recording. The Second of his four Violin Sonatas is heard in a historic recording from 1950, never before issued on CD. The violin prodigy Patricia Travers was joined by pianist Otto Herz.

There are numerous other landmark recordings gathered in this epoch-making set, exploring works from every corner of Ives’s vast output, many of them also appearing for the first time on CD. One is a wildly entertaining album entitled Old Songs Deranged, played by the Yale Theater Orchestra and never reissued after its original Columbia release a half century ago. Edited and conducted by leading Ives authority James Sinclair, it inspired this wholehearted endorsement in a recent MusicWeb International Ives survey urgently calling for its re-release: “It sounds great! The marches are high-stepping, toe-tapping, swaggering romps. The sound of the orchestra is … completely idiomatic. This recording does such a good job of evoking Ives’ description of a ‘marching band with wings’ that it practically smells like Ives. The other works are wonderful too. Pieces like ‘Mists’ and ‘Evening’ conjure Victorian salon music filtered through the nostalgia of intervening years.” In short, Sinclair’s disc is a welcome addition to Sony Classical’s “Anthology 1945–76”, without doubt the essential Ives collection.

********************************************

 

I definitely will be ordering this. 

One note regarding the quote that I've highlighted in red above: I wrote that.  The author of the press release is quoting me.   

You can see my full write-up here: https://www.musicweb-international.com/ives/RR_Other_Orchestral.htm

 

Edited November 4 by HutchFan

[rostasi]

Great to see this. I remember my excitement
over the centenary LP box set back in '74!

[JSngry]

I preordered thru Amazon, but it's being fulfilled by import cds. THEY say that I should have it next week, which is totally out of sync with the press release.

Those guys raise eyebrows damn near every time I deal with them, but I don't see where Amazon US has it right now, so...luck be a lady, whatever that looks like.

[rostasi]

Presto shows that it came out a couple of weeks ago.

[JSngry]

?!?!?!

[Chuck Nessa]

5 hours ago, rostasi said:

Great to see this. I remember my excitement
over the centenary LP box set back in '74!

I have that box and around a dozen cds. so I will need to think about this.

 

[soulpope]

Considering the new 22 CD Box 🧐.... 

[HutchFan]

10 hours ago, JSngry said:

I preordered thru Amazon, but it's being fulfilled by import cds.

I ordered from Amazon > import CDs too.  I haven't had issues with them in the past.  Fingers crossed. 

 

[mjazzg]

It's on Tidal. So as someone who's been intrigued by Ives but never really engaged, where do I start?

[JSngry]

2 hours ago, mjazzg said:

It's on Tidal. So as someone who's been intrigued by Ives but never really engaged, where do I start?

Central Park in the Dark might unknowingly be familiar to pop listeners of a certain age:

 

[HutchFan]

2 hours ago, mjazzg said:

It's on Tidal. So as someone who's been intrigued by Ives but never really engaged, where do I start?

I'd recommend starting with these works & performances:

- Three Places in New England / Ormandy, Philadelphia O (Sony) - This performance was my initial gateway into Ives' world.
- Symphony No. 2 / Bernstein, NYPO (Sony)
- The Holidays Symphony / Ormandy, Philadelphia O (Sony)
- Symphony No. 4 / Tilson Thomas, Chicago (Sony)
- Songs / Jan DeGaetani, Gilbert Kalish (Nonesuch)

The first three albums above are included in the new anthology; the last two aren't, but I'm sure they're readily available for streaming.

 

Edited November 5 by HutchFan

[mjazzg]

1 minute ago, HutchFan said:

I'd recommend starting with these works & performances:

- Three Places in New England / Ormandy, Philadelphia O (Sony) - This performance was my initial gateway into Ives' world.
- Symphony No. 2 / Bernstein, NYPO (Sony)
- The Holidays Symphony / Ormandy, Philadelphia O (Sony)
- Symphony No. 4 / Tilson Thomas, Chicago (Sony)
- Songs / Jan DeGaetani, Gilbert Kalish (Nonesuch)

The first three albums above are included in the new anthology; the last two aren't, but I'm sure they're available for streaming.

 

Great, thanks Scott. I like a little project.

[HutchFan]

7 minutes ago, mjazzg said:

Great, thanks Scott. I like a little project.

  

I'm excited for you. 

For a bit of context, I'd put Charles Ives in the same "beyond category" realms as Duke Ellington and Sun Ra. 

Each of them is utterly and fantastically unique, occupying a self-made sonic universe. 

 

Edited November 5 by HutchFan

[mjazzg]

13 minutes ago, JSngry said:

Central Park in the Dark might unknowingly be familiar to pop listeners of a certain age:

 

Video unavailable here. That piece is probably the only Ives I could take a stab at identifying

Just to add, I did listen to the new Denk recording this afternoon and enjoyed a fair deal of it so will be revisiting.

[soulpope]

1 hour ago, HutchFan said:

- Symphony No. 4 / Tilson Thomas, Chicago (Sony)

- Songs / Jan DeGaetani, Gilbert Kalish (Nonesuch)

👌👍 ....

[JSngry]

3 hours ago, mjazzg said:

Video unavailable here. That piece is probably the only Ives I could take a stab at identifying

Just to add, I did listen to the new Denk recording this afternoon and enjoyed a fair deal of it so will be revisiting.

It's "Susan" by The Buckinghams. The Pop stops, the Ives begins, and car radios across America were suspected of being faulty.

But then the pop started again.

The last time I heard the song on oldies radio, the Ives interval had been removed. Go figure.

[mjazzg]

8 minutes ago, JSngry said:

It's "Susan" by The Buckinghams. The Pop stops, the Ives begins, and car radios across America were suspected of being faulty.

But then the pop started again.

The last time I heard the song on oldies radio, the Ives interval had been removed. Go figure.

Thanks, I'll have to listen to it

[JSngry]

That was a move by the producer, James William Guercio, who used The Buckinghams to work out a lot of the stuff he would use with Chicago Transit Authority.

The band hated it, or so they claimed in retrospect.

What I'm looking forward to in this new set is (to tie this all together) the songs. I have one LP (on Nonesuch) and always wanted more.

Well, here we come, and unedited to boot!

[mjazzg]

Just now, JSngry said:

That was a move by the producer, James William Guercio, who used The Buckinghams to work out a lot of the stuff he would use with Chicago Transit Authority.

The band hated it, or so they claimed in retrospect.

What I'm looking forward to in this new set is (to tie this all together) the songs. I have one LP (on Nonesuch) and always wanted more.

Well, here we come, and unedited to boot!

Just listened to it and can see why it may have confused a few Popsters at the time

[JSngry]

Ives heard by the masses!

[JSngry]

Shipping notice!

[Chuck Nessa]

I think it is interesting they seem to have ignored the Michael Tilson Thomas series with the Concertgebouw and Chicago Symphony (4 cds).

[Chuck Nessa]

3 hours ago, JSngry said:

Shipping notice!

Where are they sending you?