The Charles Ives Sesquicentennial

The sound of all the six LPs has been completely refurbished, the scans have been redone and added if missing, and many contemporary reviews have been included.

The albums range from the celebrated (Patricia Travers in the Sonata No. 2, John Kirkpatrick in the Concord Sonata) to obscure (the Polymusic disc with orchestral and chamber premieres) to the forgotten (the first two recordings of the Symphony No. 3, the first of Three Places in New England). Just as Ives is an important figure, these early efforts - almost all made while he was alive - are worth hearing and remembering as well.

Here is a brief description of what has appeared, along with links to the original posts and the files themselves. These are presented roughly in chronological order of the recording date. At the end of the post I have added information about a new post on my other blog of a few Ives recordings from 78 that I have cleaned up from Internet Archive. The LPs are all from my collection.

This famous recording was a major impetus to Ives' renaissance. Kirkpatrick had premiered the work in 1939, whereupon critic Lawrence Gilman called it "the greatest music composed by an American, and the most deeply and essentially American in impulse and implication."

The hugely talented Patricia Travers made these commanding first recordings but quit performing just a few years later. Composer Arthur Berger wrote the Sessions "is invested with just the right amount of repose - revealing intrinsic beauties I had only vaguely suspected it of having. The Ives, by contrast, which has been played in a rambling fashion, ruminating over the hymn-tune and the country-dance, takes on remarkable shape in her reading."

This earliest recording of the third symphony was received cordially, more for the music perhaps than the performance. Berger wrote that the work "was prophetic of the hymn-tune style Copland and Thomson later developed as one means of being American in idiom. Though prophetic, it is far more conservative than the next Ives symphony. It goes on too long at too even a temper, but certain given sections ... must be considered music of quality."

This LP comprised first recordings except for the violin sonata, which Patricia Travers had released the year before. The reviewer for The New Records raved about it at the time: "To hear this music, not once but several times, is to have a new and wonderful experience. Imagine what would have been said in 1908! ... The demands on the musicians are great and they answer that challenge with much skill and conviction."

The first recording of a important Ives work was coupled with an concerto trifle. But the Ives was admired. Here's Arthur Berger: "An atmosphere and orchestral invention comparable to Berg's is often the background to a simple, homely folk tune. The work as a whole is Ives at his very best, and is one of the significant landmarks in American music." Hendl and the orchestra are excellent.

While longing for a recording of the fourth symphony, Saturday Review's Berger lamented "we must be content with his Third Symphony, which Stewart did well to record in Baltimore ... now that the older [i.e., Bales] version has been withdrawn. Richard Donovan's suite for strings and oboe on the overside is a serious effort, robust and motory, but a bit short on ideas in the finale."

My other blog is offering a few 78 transfers that I cleaned up from Internet Archive originals. These include music of Ives and Carl Ruggles conducted by Nicolas Slonimsky in 1934, and a 1949 Ives disc from Werner Janssen leading a Los Angeles orchestra.