Ives
Four Ragtime Dances (1902-04, rev. 1916)
Fugue in Four Keys on ‘The Shining Shore’ (c1903)
The Pond (c1906, rev, c1912-13)
The Rainbow (first version, 1914)
An Old Song Deranged (c1903)
Skit for Danbury Fair (c1909, real. Sinclair)
The Gong on the Hook and Ladder or Fireman’s Parade on Main Street (c1911, rev. 1934)
Chromâtimelôdtune (c1923, real. Singleton)
Tone Roads – no.1 (c1913-14); no.3 (c1911/13-14)
Set of Incomplete Works and Fragments (ed. Singleton/Sinclair, 1974)
March no.2, with ‘Son of a Gambolier’ (c1892)
March no.3, with ‘My Old Kentucky Home’ (c1893)
March ‘The Circus Band’ (c1898-99, rev. 1932-33)
Arrangements (1896-97) – Schubert: Marche militaire in D, D733 No. 1 (1818). Schumann: Valse noble, Op. 9 No. 4 (1834-35). Schubert: Impromptu in C minor, D899 No. 1 (1827)

Orchestra New England, Orquesta Sinfónica de Navarra (arrangements) / James Sinclair

Naxos American Classics 8.559954 [75’43”]
Editions John Kirkpatrick, Jacques-Louis Monod, James Sinclair, Kenneth Singleton and Richard Swift
Producers Neely Bruce, Jan Swafford Engineers Benjamin Schwarz with Jonathan Galle and Gonzalo Noqué

Recorded 24/25 October 2023 at Auditorio Barañaín, Pamplona-Navarra, Spain (arrangements), 12-14 March 2024 at Colony Hall/Choate Rosemary Hall, Wallingford CT, USA

Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse

What’s the story?

Naxos continues its long-term series devoted to the orchestral music of Charles Ives with this volume of shorter pieces and arrangements, several of them recorded for the first time and conducted by James Sinclair, whose involvement with the composer now stretches back across 50 years.

What’s the music like?

Miniatures for a variety of forces are found right across the four decades of Ives’s composing and range from unformed experiments to perfectly realized exemplars of his idiom. Many of these were collated in the dozen or so Sets that Ives assembled at various stages in his career (recorded on Naxos 8.559917) while there are various others which resist any such compiling, and these can mostly be found here – often in critical editions prepared by a formidable team of Ives scholars, hence rounding out the picture of his creativity in the most immediate terms.

Written at the outset of the genre’s golden age, the Four Ragtime Dances neatly complement each other as regards form and content; elements from each finding their way into the second movement (The Rockstrewn Hills) from the Second Orchestral Set, which builds upon their anarchic humour accordingly. Following the shimmering polytonal ambivalence of the Fugue on ‘The Shining Shore’, the unworldly evocations The Pond and The Rainbow find Ives at his most intimate and confessional – as does the admittedly more genial An Old Song Deranged. Not so Skit for Danbury Fair, its inherent iconoclasm finding greater focus in the graphically descriptive The Gong on the Hook and Ladder or contrasting Tone Roads Nos. 1 and 3 which embody Ives’s thinking on indivisibility of life and music in the most uncompromising terms.

It was once thought Chromâtimelôdtune might be the missing Tone Road No. 2, yet this late and possibly incomplete piece is likely an acerbic response to the Modernism emerging from post-war Europe which seemingly preoccupied Ives in those twilight years of his composing. The three song-based Marches date from an earlier and ostensibly more carefree phase, their debunking couched in humorous terms, while the Set of Incomplete Works and Fragments is a judiciously conceived entity that should not have had to wait 50 years for its first recording. The orchestrations are from Ives’s study with Horatio Parker at Yale: that of Schubert’s First Marche Militaire and Schumann’s Valse noble (from Carnaval) are expert but anonymous, that of Schubert’s First Impromptu results in a ‘theme and variations’ of striking prescience.

Does it all work?

Yes, inasmuch that the effectiveness of these pieces largely depends on the conviction of their performers and, with Sinclair at the helm, this can be taken for granted. As can the excellence of Orchestra New England in repertoire it has often been playing for decades, and if Orquesta Sinfónica de Navarra might appear an unlikely choice for Ives’s undergraduate arrangements, it acquits itself admirably. The sound throughout is unexceptionally fine, and Sinclair’s own annotations are succinctly informative as to the genesis and context of some intriguing music.

Is it recommended?

Indeed, this is a necessary addition to a valuable series – hopefully to be continued before too long with recordings of the Fourth Symphony and Universe Symphony as partially realized by David Porter, of which Sinclair gave a memorable account at the Aldeburgh Festival in 2012.

Listen & Buy

For buying options, you can visit the Naxos website – or listen to the recording on Tidal below:

Click on the names for more information on conductor James Sinclair, Orchestra New England, Orquesta Sinfónica de Navarra and the Charles Ives Society.

Published post no.2,382 – Wednesday 4 December 2024