Charles Ives: Complete Symphonies, Los Angeles Philharmonic & Gustavo Dudamel
“Robert Browning Overture”
Fourteen years ago the Phil did this under Ingo Metzmacher. Memorable not only as a terrific performance, but as the first time I ever had the opportunity to hear one of Ives’s orchestral pieces. An inexcusable wait, but worth it. An interesting extra for this recording - a bit of no-fooling Ives collage. The orchestra is deployed as a collection of distinct forces, operating independent of each other, or else in direct opposition. The brasses against the strings against the reeds. The middle section had the darkly glittering textures: beauty but also terror and exaltation. And evolving further into an animated cartoon of riffs, fashioning an idiosyncratic integrity.
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