Ives

Burl Ives - All My Best (1995) {MCA MSD-35732}
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© 1995 MCA Records / The Beautiful Music Company | MSD-35732
Folk / Country / Ballad / Folk Pop

Gen X-ers will instantly recognize Burl Ives's voice from his appearance as a rotund snowman in the animated TV classic Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. But more mature listeners should remember that Ives was a key figure in the folk explosion of the '50s. His pop handling of traditional tunes brought him great success, and this CD collects some of his best. A few tracks, like a swinging "Blue Tail Fly," complete with Andrews Sisters-style background singing, may seem anathema to the folk aesthetic, but that's splitting hairs. If nothing else, this is exceedingly friendly music, and there's nothing wrong with that.

Charles Ives – Complete Symphonies offers fresh insights into the music of a radical thinker, creator of what Leonard Bernstein called “his own private musical revolution.” The Los Angeles Philharmonic’s performances of these works at Walt Disney Concert Hall, conducted by Music & Artistic Director Gustavo Dudamel, received rave reviews. With their restless energy, myriad colors and textures, irresistible references to popular American melodies and impulsive changes of mood, these symphonies reveal the heart of “a man full of ideas [who] was trying to create something unique,” according to Dudamel. “When you see calm and contemplation, maybe in a moment it’s complete chaos. At the end, what Ives was doing was opening the door to the texture and the personality of music created in the United States. His symphonies are a great gift to the world.”

Charles Ives – Complete Symphonies offers fresh insights into the music of a radical thinker, creator of what Leonard Bernstein called “his own private musical revolution.” The Los Angeles Philharmonic’s performances of these works at Walt Disney Concert Hall, conducted by Music & Artistic Director Gustavo Dudamel, received rave reviews. With their restless energy, myriad colors and textures, irresistible references to popular American melodies and impulsive changes of mood, these symphonies reveal the heart of “a man full of ideas [who] was trying to create something unique,” according to Dudamel. “When you see calm and contemplation, maybe in a moment it’s complete chaos. At the end, what Ives was doing was opening the door to the texture and the personality of music created in the United States. His symphonies are a great gift to the world.”

Donald Berman is a superlative pianist, but as any number of attempts by excellent players have shown, it takes more than technique to bring Ives alive. To my ears Berman's Ives most resembles the playing of Ives himself, as we hear it in the composer's private recordings. With Berman there is the same subtlety of voicing you hear in Ives's playing, the same power combined with delicacy—a surprising thing to say about Ives, but that's how he often played his own music. Berman studied with John Kirkpatrick, the composer's first great interpreter, and kept growing from those studies. Ives was a prophetic genius whose consciousness, and piano writing, stayed rooted in Romanticism. For a pianist that's a very difficult balancing act, but Berman handles it beautifully. A new generation of performers are reaching a mature and seasoned approach to Ives, and Donald Berman is a vital part of that achievement.

Jan Swafford, author of "Charles Ives: A Life with Music" (1996, W.W. Norton)

Previous releases from the New York-based Escher Quartet include an acclaimed set of Mendelsohn’s six string quartets as well as an album with works by Dvořák, Tchaikovsky and Borodin. For their latest offering the members have looked closer to home, however, choosing to combine the quartets by Samuel Barber and Charles Ives. The disc opens with Barber’s String Quartet in B minor, containing the music for which the composer remains best-known: the second movement which he two years later expanded into Adagio for Strings.