Charles Ives: Complete Symphonies, Los Angeles Philharmonic & Gustavo Dudamel
2.1. Ives’s string orchestras are a thing. At the performance, the sheer beauty of the Phil’s playing transfixed obliterated every question and concern. (Precedent: the Phil’s 1975 recording of this with Zubin Mehta was grandly late-romantic: “Transfigured CT”.) Then the jolt of “Columbia” ringing out bright and clear, four minutes in. Appears and vanishes. Is this an historic moment? Is this the musical equivalent of Braque’s collage? Or is it a joke? But what is this joke, really? Ives has been unspooling intricate and earnest polyphony. The tone is genial. There is no danger of it veering off into darkness. Is he mocking his own music? It’s abstractness? Or all of the above, like the familiar images Jasper Johns uses, at once abstract, representational, earnest, ironic, and ambiguous.
2.2. A meditation on memory, time and space contemporary with Freud, Bergson, Proust, the movies. This is where Charles Ives becomes Charles Ives. Music that recalls moments of music-making. Fragments, quotations, the stuff in our heads, pass in review. They become jumbled, sliding into chaos. But then the brass – Ives's father’s brass band – comes to the rescue. The Phil keeps it moving, but, appropriately, leaves room for entropy. I don’t recall ever hearing the beautiful popcorn pop of the snare drums. Or the sign-off so wobbly, hungover.
2.3. After patriotic Saturday night, a moment of reflection. Stephen Foster and Sunday morning songs. Remix. Does Spotify have an 1880s playlist? The allusions aren’t essential. Ives’s subject isn’t Danbury but his process of remembering. His free-association. Freud, Proust, Pound. The band shell, the campground, the church. Not that they are intrinsically significant. Their significance is in CI’s use of them. The performance was searing, whatever the associated matter. I’m reminded of Shostakovich, of all people. “American the Beautiful” earnestly, ambiguously, plaintively.
2.4. 3-minute second thought? “Columbia” popping up again: an iceberg to crush the touch of grandiosity?
2.5. Then immediately jump into razzle-dazzle Gay Nineties pit orchestra recapitulation/finale. Then a violin and flute: piercing. But not exactly a duet. More like taking in musics issuing from different houses. Or, idle noodling on the keyboard, idle tooting, after the piece has been played. In the last two minutes the different elements are running off the rails – almost. Each element shouting its head off. And the razz at the end is well razzed. At the performance, the finale prompted a roar of approval.
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