Ives

Whereas most musicians seem to emphasize the music's reflective, nostalgic elements, Schneeberger and Cholette are more attuned to the abstract qualities in the music. On balance, I find that I still prefer the traditional approach, exemplified by Shannon and Fulkerson. To my ears, these artists manage to capture something wonderfully magical and mysterious that just eludes Schneeberger and Cholette. However, I should note that some critics have given high praise to this ECM disc. For example, it was awarded five stars in a BBC Music Magazine review. Another bonus: The ECM recording squeezes all four sonatas on a single disc.

Charles Ives’s innovations, his seemingly cluttered experiments, his use of quotation (from indigenous folk-tunes to Beethoven’s Fifth!) and his visionary ability to suggest and collide his childhood (Holidays Symphony) and look beyond ourselves (The Unanswered Question) has his detractors seeing him, at best, as eccentric. This CD brings maximum contrast from the off – first comes the 90-second Scherzo, gnarled and angular, from a European acolyte of radical Schoenberg maybe, which is followed by the hymnal opening of the First Quartet, music that became the third movement of Ives’s remarkable Fourth Symphony, and which could easily have been composed by Dvorak in America, save the harmony wouldn’t have ’slipped’ so much! This Quartet, completed in 1902, is in the conventional four movements.

The Sixteen, bright stars of the Baroque, have plenty to say on 20th-century repertoire (witness their excellent Britten series on Collins). Underpin them with the BBC Philharmonic and it might seem a magic formula. Ives’s unearthly The Unanswered Question holds few problems for instrumental players weaned on Maxwell Davies – no more than do the brilliant wind roulades of Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms. Deft BBC teamwork and a chamber articulation to woodwind and brass helps this Koussevitzky-commissioned masterpiece to shed its often hammy ‘big band’ sound, creeping closer to the subtle, leaner sonorities of his later choral works. It gains. The singing varies. Too many dynamic shifts sound prosaic or under-prepared; fortes are forced, with muddy results. The vocal blend (happier in lower voices) can seem haphazard and colours the Tippett, where the men’s roars – contrast the lovely, sensual soprano solo – seem crude. Get this disc, instead, for the rare, late Poulenc – his New York-commissioned Sept répons. It is a curiously under-recorded devotional work, bleeding with pathos yet pumping energy, its exoticism enhanced by slightly breathy, tender solos, and scintillatingly sung with just those crucial missing qualities of awe and freshness. A million times more refined than what goes before.

There's always been a crossover appeal among avant, jazz artists with renegade contemporary classical composers. As with various musical forms, and perhaps life in general, rules are sometimes meant to be broken. String Quartet features a 1979-penned composition by Morton Feldman, recorded by the highly-regarded Dutch group known as the Charles Ives Ensemble.

This recording offers impassioned, clear, and intelligent presentations of two little-known but impressive pieces of earlier twentieth century music.

On her first Pentatone album, pianist Tamara Stefanovich presents a highly personal selection of solo works by Bach, Bartók, Ives and Messiaen. Influences shows how these extraordinarily original and idiosyncratic composers let themselves be inspired by the exterior world, thereby demonstrating how authenticity comes from looking outside as well as inside. The repertoire spans from Bach's embrace of Italian musical elements in his Aria variata alla maniera italiana, Bartók's incorporation of folk elements in his Improvisations on Hungarian Peasant Songs, and Messiaen's use of Hindu rhythms in Cantéyodjayâ to the collage of marching bands, sounds of trains and machinery, church hymns, ragtime and blues in Ives' first piano sonata.

After appearing on a quartet of very different BIS releases, ranging from early baroque arias to orchestral songs by Alban Berg and Mahler’s ‘Resurrection Symphony’, the British soprano Ruby Hughes has devised a song recital, together with her regular Lieder partner Joseph Middleton. The process began in 2018 when the two gave the world première of Helen Grime’s Bright Travellers, a set of five poems charting the interior and exterior worlds of pregnancy and motherhood. Ruby Hughes soon set about planning a programme which would converge with Grime’s music and the themes of new life and of love in all its aspects.

“An indispensable DVD. To watch Bernstein conduct these supreme masterpieces of American music is a joy and a privilege in itself…there is an authentically spontaneous command of idiom here; Bernstein is both a superb soloist and conductor in the Rhapsody and the New Yorkers respond in a proprietorial way.” Penguin Guide

In a second disc of Ives’s songs, the unbeatable partnership of Finley and Drake again enthral their listeners and bring them to the emotional core of each work. The range of style and approach in Ives’s text-setting is startling—from simple, sentimental ballads to complex and strenuous philosophical discourses, sometimes encompassing the most dissonant and virtuosic piano parts, sometimes with the accompaniment pared down to an almost minimalist phrase-repetition. Even those composed in a superficially conventional or ‘polite’ tonal idiom usually contain harmonic, rhythmic or accentual surprises somewhere.