Born January 19, 1921, author of Strangers on a train, the Ripley stories, and many other books, including The Price of Salt (1952):
“I don’t know any small towns in Illinois," Carol was saying. "Why Illinois? … All right, Rockford … I’ll remember, I’ll think of Roquefort …”
...
Therese could smell Carol’s perfume faintly, that familiar sweetness that was strangely unfamiliar now, because it did not evoke what it had once evoked.
Charles Ives: Complete Symphonies, Los Angeles Philharmonic & Gustavo Dudamel
Can any of this music matter now? How could it?
If it was …
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.
Charles Ives: Complete Symphonies, Los Angeles Philharmonic & Gustavo Dudamel
4.1. The performance felt like a church service yanked out of shape – or into shape. Into another kind of order. Not a spoof at all, but earnest, with expressionist detonations in a dreamscape. The chorus – as if overheard from somewhere else – asking, “Watchman, tell us of the night / what its signs of promise are. … Tell us ….”
4.2. Taking the listener on a wild ride. The real jolts come in the quiet passages between the noisy explosions. The strings keening off key. The tiny taps, parps, and gurgles resounding without clear direction or trajectory. Joanne Pearce Martin nailing the concise piano concerto that's folded inside. At the performance last February, the non-fanatics sitting around us seemed restless and uncomfortable. Still able to unsettle. In the recording, the different elements are clear and sharply defined. No blur, no muddle, heroically defined. Each element retains its integrity.
4.3. Then another kind of disruption: a lush fugue. A hymn – and the people singing the hymn – figuring as parts of a pattern.
4.4. Drums barely audible far off. Gagaku ghosts drone. A string detonation, then screech. Bits of tunes with ragged edges. Not afraid of sounds that are ugly or unmusical. The Phil brings out things I’ve never heard before: the flat horn blast about four minutes in, the goofy razz a bit later, the soloists standing out from the wordless chorus. Individual elements of a mobile, balanced against each other, circling overhead.
Charles Ives: Complete Symphonies, Los Angeles Philharmonic & Gustavo Dudamel
Symphony #3. Score! This could push this piece into the active repertoire, finally.
3.1. The Leonard Bernstein’s 1965 recording made this luminous ultra-Copland. The 1995 version of the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra was sharper-edged. Twenty-five years later, the L.A. Phil clarifies the alternation of moods: expansive/intensive, exalted/satirical, transcendental/parochial. At first dogmatic, earnest, grim – but ending with a glimpse of the sky, fresh air. Ives titled it “Old Folks Gatherin'”, which it could be. But more: a specific hymn sounding in a general dawn.
3.2. “Children’s Day”? A bit too complicated for a romp. Not nostalgia but the earnestness of the game. The skip becomes a bit awkward. The call and response a bit harsh. Flirting, teasing. Finally heavier, steadier, slower, gently dissonant.
3.3. Bernstein made this “Communion” simultaneously swagger and satirize swaggering. Introductory interrogatatories: quiet, soft, but too Edward Hopper to be complacent. Where are we? A crisis? Yes, but evolving. Violin dance for a while. Big declamation winding-down.
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.
Charles Ives: Complete Symphonies, Los Angeles Philharmonic & Gustavo Dudamel
Last February the first minutes of the Phil’s performance made me realize that all my recordings of this work were worthless.
The pre-concert talk noted that it had been 46 years since the Phil had played it; it should be played all the time.
First of all, making the case that Ives isn’t all collage and cacophony.
1st part: Restrained anxiety. Bernard Herrmann, after all, was a fan. Then, the brats in the back of the room make faces while the adults dance about, very proud of their grace and esprit. Driving steadily forward. Tight and controlled, plaintive without sorrow. At the performance, this movement generated a boisterous response – a loud and clear “Bravo!” despite being warned about the recording.
1.2: Nostalgia and pathos with smudges of irony.
1.3: Athletic skip and swing.
1.4: More elevated gaiety. Is this what CEI means when he says, “Beethoven”? Horns blare out “Columbia”: a scene, a landscape through which diverse moods and tones circulate simultaneously, elevated and otherwise. The middle achieves a polyphonic chaos that’s hair-raising.
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“… This summer has passed like a dream. On the last / day of August / I feel much better than I felt in June, heaven be praised. / Who said, ‘Only / health is beautiful’? There’s truth in the old saw. I / have always been / more interested in truth than in imagination: I / wonder if that’s / true? …”