Charles Ives

The Piano Sonata No. 2 ("Concord") of Charles Ives has tended to overshadow its predecessor, and it's no accident that pianist Joonas Ahonen chose to record that one first. The Piano Sonata No. 1, begun in 1901, represented an underappreciated breakthrough for Ives, even if he did continue to tinker with it into the 1920s. The work encompasses the polyphonic weaving of many strands of American music that would occupy Ives for much of his mature compositional life. Although the composer described it as inspired by "Impressions, Remembrances, & Reflections of Country Farmers in Conn.[ecticut] Farmland," it might better be described as a dialogue between country and city, with Protestant hymns set against and sometimes merged with a ragtime pulse as strong as any elsewhere in Ives' music.

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. Recognizing its potential already while composing it, Barber described the piece as ‘a knock-out’ – which made it all the more difficult to come up with a third movement worthy to follow it.

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

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.

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.

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.”

Sideshow - Songs Of Charles Ives (2001) {CRI BlueShift CD2000}
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© 2001 CRI / BlueShift | CD 2000
Jazz / Classical / Third Stream / Avant-Garde Jazz / Modern Classical

CRI (Composers Recordings Inc., a non-profit, composer-directed American new music label) introduced their "blueshift" imprint in 2001 with this unique merging of jazz and the music of Charles Ives. The recording itself, however, was made in November, 1988 at Tedesco Studios in New Jersey and engineered by Jon Rosenberg, produced by Matt Moran and Adam Good (the vibraphone player and the guitarist, respectively, on the recording). The other musicians are John Hollenbeck (drums and other percussion) and Oscar Noriega (alto saxophone and bass clarinet).

Pulitzer and Erasmus Prize-winning composer John Adams occupies a unique position in the world of American music. His works stand out among contemporary classical compositions for their depth of expression, brilliance of sound, and the profoundly humanist nature of their themes. Adams describes My Father Knew Charles Ives as “an homage and encomium to a composer whose influence on me has been huge.” Harmonielehre was a deliberate move by Adams to expand his musical language beyond Minimalism, keeping its energetic pulse but embracing the rich tonal resources of the past to create a work that has accrued an aura of timelessness.