Sony Bungles Significant Ives Anniversary

Charles Ives on the cover of the CD Ives plays Ives: The Complete Recordings of Charles Ives at the
Piano, a better account of the composer than can be found in the Sony Anniversary Edition (from its Amazon.com Web page)

I have to confess from the very beginning that I had no idea I would be so aggravated by the recent Sony Music release of music of Charles Ives entitled The Anniversary Edition. The only thing that Sony got right was that their five-CD collection was released almost exactly 150 years after Ives’ birth on October 20, 1874. Furthermore, the full title of the last CD is Charles Ives Remembered: Reminiscences of the Composer by Relatives, Friends and Associates.

To be fair, at least a few of the voices on that CD deserve more than passing attention. One of the contributors, John Kirkpatrick, is significantly important, since he was the first pianist to play the “Concord Sonata.” Sadly, in the Sony collection, one hears only excerpts from that most challenging composition, and those excerpts come from the recordings of Ives himself that appear on the fourth CD in the collection. Another major contributor was Nicolas Slonimsky, a leading champion of “new music” during the twentieth century. On the other hand I was more than a little perplexed to listen to comments by Elliott Carter. During my senior year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Carter was a Visiting Professor of Music. I attended all of his lectures and vividly remember his confession that he had no clue as to why Ives did what he did as a composer!

If The Anniversary Edition has any assets at all, they are do be found, for the most part, on the third of the five CDs. On that album Kirkpatrick accompanies soprano Helen Boatwright in a performance of 25 of the songs collected in the 114 Songs published by Peer International Publication under the auspices of The National Institute of Arts and Letters. The title of the fourth CD, on the other hand, is a pale shadow on an album released by New World Records entitled Ives plays Ives: The Complete Recordings of Charles Ives at the Piano. This includes a complete performance of the “The Alcotts” movement from the second (“Concord”) piano sonata, along with a diversity of more fragmented offerings. All other tracks in the new collection can be traced down to past Columbia releases involving performances that never quite caught the spirit that had inspired Ives to compose in the first place.

Those that do decide to acquire this collection may be surprised to see that many of the tracks are conducted by Leopold Stokowski. This did not raise my eyebrows, because I used to have the vinyl album of Stokowski conducting Ives’ fourth symphony, for which he required two (count them!, as the billboards would say) assistant conductors, David Katz and José Serebrier. The good news is that the recording of that performance is currently available through another Sony release. That album may offer far fewer examples of Ives’ compositions, but it does offer almost 70 minutes of recordings of Ives performances that are far more worthy of attentive listening.