Oct. 18: Sony Classical Presents Charles Ives – The Anniversary Edition in celebration of the 150th Anniversary of the American Composer

Sony Classical Presents
Charles Ives – The Anniversary Edition
in celebration of the 150th Anniversary of
American Composer Charles Ives

The first re-issue of Columbia Masterworks legendary
Anniversary Edition from 1974
In collaboration with Yale Music Library, home of the Charles Ives papers

Album Release Date: October 18, 2024
Reviewer Rate Upon Request

On the 150th anniversary of the birth of Charles Ives – acclaimed by his champion Leonard Bernstein as the “first great American composer”, who, “all alone in his Connecticut barn, created his own private musical revolution” – Sony Classical presents the most authoritative recording collection ever released of works by this eccentric, prophetic genius. The 5-CD box set Charles Ives – The Anniversary Edition, which will be released by Sony Classical on October 18, 2024, is a unique and provocative introduction only released previously 50 years ago on LP by Columbia Masterworks under the art 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 towering achievements, and The Circus Band are performed by the Gregg Smith Singers; baritone Thomas Stewart sings the moving 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 Largo cantabile Hymn is performed by the New York String Quartet and double bass player Alvin Brehm.

CD 2, “The Celestial Country”, offers Ives’s early cantata by that name, composed in 1897–99 for his conservative Yale composition teacher 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 conducting.

“The Things Our Fathers Loved”, CD 3, contains 25 of Ives’s songs, delivered by the soprano Helen Boatwright, who specialized in American song. She is partnered by John Kirkpatrick, who studied and worked closely with Ives and is still regarded as the most authoritative interpreter of his piano music. Gramophone in 1974 praised this famous recording as “the finest selection ever to appear” on LP of “what may well turn out to be considered his most important, characteristic and consistently inspired body of music.”

The next CD is unusually revealing: “Ives Plays Ives” features the composer himself in 1933, 1938 and 1943, thumping out snippets of his pathbreaking “Concord” Sonata and shorter piano pieces in the New York recording studio of Mary Howard, Toscanini’s recording engineer. In his performance of the “Concord” Sonata’s slow movement, “The Alcotts”, wrote a Gramophone commentator, Ives “Ives’s playing is heartfelt but objective, a yin-meets-yang quality that wise performances embrace.” During three brief extracts from “Emerson”, the sonata’s opening movement, the writer goes on to say, “Ives hands pianists a timbral blueprint for the base sound he imagined: bangy attack, boozy rhythmic freedom; this is not the time or the place for consciously refined, ‘pretty’ playing.”

The last disc in the set is called “Charles Ives Remembered”. This fascinating collage of spoken reminiscences was the first-ever documentation of a musical figure using oral history. More than 50 interviews with family, friends, neighbors and colleagues create a vivid memory portrait of this enigmatic figure in the voices of the people who knew him best. Moving from Ives’s childhood and years at Yale to his public career as an insurance executive and his private career as a composer, the memories and reflections assembled by award-winning musicologist Vivian Perlis provide a multi-faceted and humanizing view of an enigmatic American musical icon.

SET CONTENTS

DISC 1

The Many Faces Of Charles Ives
The Fourth Of July • The Unanswered Question • In Flanders Fields • Hymn (Largo Cantabile) • The Pond • Variations On "America" • The Circus Band • General William Booth Enters Into Heaven

DISC 2

The Celestial Country
They Are There! (Choral Version) • Majority (Or The Masses) • An Election • Lincoln, The Great Commoner

DISC 3

The Things Our Fathers Loved
25 Ives Songs
Helen Boatwright, soprano; John Kirkpatrick, piano

DISC 4

Ives Plays Ives
Charles Ives performs his own works at the piano

DISC 5

Charles Ives Remembered
Reminiscences Of the Composer By Relatives, Friends And Associates
With A. J. "Babe" LaPine, Bernard Herrmann, Bigelow Ives, Charles Buesing, Chester Ives, Elliott Carter, George Tyler, John Kirkpatrick, Julian Myrick, L. Parkins, Lehman Engel, Mary Howard, Mrs. George F. Roberts, Richard Ives, Watson Washburn
Interviewer: Vivian Perlis