Further Ives “Sets” from James Sinclair

Front cover of the Naxos album of Charles Ives’ “orchestral” sets (courtesy of Naxos of America)

I was sufficiently impressed with James Sinclair’s studied approach to the “sets” for chamber orchestra composed by Charles Ives that I felt motivated to listen to other Naxos albums on Ives’ music conducted by Sinclair. This led to my listening to the album of the three “orchestral” sets; and, because one thing always leads to another, I followed up with an album that included three of the four movements from the “New England Holidays” symphony. Sinclair’s commitment to doing right by Ives seems to have required a fair amount of travel. The chamber orchestra sets were recorded here in the United States with Orchestra New England, but the recordings for the other two albums were made between June of 2006 and January of 2008 at the Konsertsalen in Malmö, Sweden. Each album has at least one world premiere recording, and both of them recorded performances by the Malmö Symphony Orchestra and Chamber Chorus.

The album of the orchestral sets is of particular importance, because it presents a performing version of the third set, which Ives himself never finished. Nors Josephson provided a realization for the concluding Andante movement, while the scores for the first two sets were edited by David Gray Porter. The first set, on the other hand, is basically the first version of the Three Places in New England suite; and that score was edited for performance purposes by Sinclair himself. I suspect that most listeners will not be aware of there being two different versions; but scholarship junkies (like myself) were glad to see Sinclair’s efforts realized in a recorded performance. Nevertheless, my own personal favorite on this album is the second set, whose final movement, “From Hanover Square North, at the End of a Tragic Day, the Voice of the People Again Arose,” never fails to bring chills down my spine.

The “New England Holidays” album has only the final three movements of the symphony. (An account of the first should be coming soon.) “The Fourth of July” involves a realization of score materials provided by Wayne D. Shirley, while the score for “Thanksgiving and Forefathers’ Day” was edited by Jonathan Elkus. Sinclair himself edited the “Decoration Day” movement. There are also pairs of single-movement compositions between the “Holidays” movements. Two of these are “abstract,” an overture realized by Porter and a postlude edited by Kenneth Singleton. Sinclair prepared a realization of Ives’ attempt to present a football game (Yale versus Princeton) on staff paper, while Porter contributed a realization of “The General Slocum,” an account of a 1904 boating disaster.

There is an old joke about an elementary school child that wrote a one-sentence book report: “This book tells me more about penguins than I would ever want to know.” Sinclair’s efforts were clearly not aimed at casual listeners. Nevertheless, his performances provide no end of insights, even when Ives is at his most cryptic; and I, for one, am delighted to have encountered these albums.