Charles Ives The Anniversary Edition 5 CDs

Release Date October 18, 2024

5-CD Edition

On the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the American composer
The first reissue of the legendary Columbia Masterworks Anniversary Edition from 1974 in collaboration with the Yale Music Library, home of Charles Ives’s papers.

On the 150th anniversary of the birth of Charles Ives – hailed by his champion Leonard Bernstein as the “first great American composer”, who “all by himself in his Connecticut barn, created his own private musical revolution” – Sony Classical presents the most authoritative collection of recordings ever issued of works by this eccentric and prophetic genius. The 5-CD box set Charles Ives – The Anniversary Edition is a unique, avant-garde introduction that Columbia Masterworks issued 50 years ago on LP under the artistic direction of Henrietta Condak to celebrate Ives’s centenary.
The first disc examines “the many faces of Charles Ives” through eight diverse works recorded between 1964 and 1970: Bernstein conducts the New York Philharmonic in The Fourth of July and The Unanswered Question; General William Booth Enters into Heaven, one of Ives’s greatest achievements, and The Circus Band are performed by the Gregg Smith Singers; baritone Thomas Stewart sings the poignant song In Flanders Fields; organist E. Power Biggs plays Ives’s Variations on “America”; composer Gunther Schuller conducts The Pond for chamber orchestra; and the long cantabile Hymn is performed by the New York String Quartet and double bassist Alvin Brehm.
CD 2, “The Celestial Country”, offers Ives’s early cantata of that name, composed in 1897–99 for his conservative Yale composition professor Horatio Parker. It is sung by the Gregg Smith Singers (accompanied by the Columbia Chamber Orchestra), who also perform arrangements of four of Ives’s most powerful patriotic songs with the American Symphony Orchestra and Leopold Stokowski at the helm.
“The Things Our Fathers Loved”, CD 3, contains 25 of Ives’s songs, performed by soprano Helen Boatwright, a specialist in American song. She is accompanied by John Kirkpatrick, who studied and worked closely with Ives and remains regarded as the finest interpreter of his piano music. In 1974, Gramophone praised this famous recording as “the best selection ever to appear” on LP of “what may well come to be considered his most important, characteristic, and consistently inspired musical corpus.”
The next CD is unusually revealing: “Ives Plays Ives” features the composer himself in 1933, 1938 and 1943, picking out fragments from his groundbreaking “Concord” Sonata and shorter piano pieces in the New York recording studio of Mary Howard, Toscanini’s recording engineer. In his performance of the slow movement from the “Concord” Sonata, “The Alcotts”, a Gramophone commentator wrote, Ives “plays from the heart but with objectivity, a yin-and-yang quality that wise performances embrace.” For three brief excerpts from “Emerson”, the sonata’s opening movement, the writer goes on to say: “Ives delivers to pianists a timbral blueprint for the base sound he envisioned: explosive attack, drunken rhythmic freedom – no time or place for consciously refined, ‘pretty’ playing.”
The final disc in the set is called “Charles Ives Remembered”. This fascinating collage of spoken reminiscences constituted the first time a musical figure was documented using oral history. Over 50 interviews with family, friends, neighbours and colleagues create a vivid memory portrait of this enigmatic figure in the voices of the people who knew him best. From Ives’s childhood and Yale years to his public career as an insurance executive and his private one as a composer, the memories and reflections gathered by award-winning musicologist Vivian Perlis offer a multifaceted, humanising glimpse of an enigmatic American musical icon.