United States ‘Charles Ives’s America’: William Sharp (baritone), Donald Berman (piano), J. Peter Burkholder (host), The Orchestra Now / Leon Botstein (conductor). Fisher Center, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, 17.11.2024. (RP)
Ives – ‘The Fourth of July’ from the Holidays Symphony; ‘Central Park in the Dark’; Orchestral Set No.2; Symphony No.2
Charles Ives was born 150 years ago on 20 October 1874 in Danbury, CT. He was one of music’s great innovators, whose imaginative and often radical techniques presaged the stylistic developments of later twentieth-century composers. To celebrate his sesquicentennial, Leon Botstein and The Orchestra Now (TŌN) presented ‘Charles Ives’s America’, a fascinating exploration of the man and his music
Ives is an atypical case of a musical genius who chose a business career over artistic pursuits and excelled at both. His Yankee pragmatism was apparent from the start: as he wrote upon graduating from Yale in 1898, ‘If he has a nice wife and some nice children, how can he let the children starve on his dissonances?’ His success in the insurance industry gave him the freedom to compose music unbeholden to anyone.
Performances of symphonic works were just one aspect of ‘Charles Ives’s America’. J. Peter Burkholder, who has written extensively on Ives and his music, was the porthole through which the audience entered the composer’s world. Burkholder connected the music to be performed to time and place, highlighting the popular music, patriotic tunes and religious songs that course through them.
Music once known to most Americans, such as the gospel song ‘Bringing in the Sheaves’, the patriotic favorite ‘Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean’ or Stephen Foster’s ‘Old Black Joe’ – to say nothing of the lively dance tune ‘Pig Town Fling’ – are all but unknown today. Yet they form the backbone of Ives’s works. Having the songs explained and then hearing them performed added immeasurably to understanding and appreciating the orchestral music heard in this concert.
Snippets of the songs were played by individual musicians or whole sections of the orchestra, but an equal number were sung by baritone William Sharp with Donald Berman on the piano. Sharp, who is now 73, has championed the works of American composers throughout his career. His voice, it must be said, is in amazing condition for his age.
Berman was the only student of John Kirkpatrick, who premiered Ives’s ‘Concord’ Piano Sonata in 1939. In turn, Kirkpatrick was Berman’s only teacher. Berman has produced critical editions of the composer’s works in addition to performing and recording them. He was an authoritative figure, second to none on stage, when it came to the topics at hand.
Botstein wears many hats, one of which is the music director of TŌN, the training orchestra at Bard College which he founded in 2015. The players are conservatory graduates who experience the life of professional orchestra players – rehearsing, performing, recording – combined with the conventional aspects of a post-graduate training program. These are musicians born in the twenty-first-century, performing and bringing fresh perspectives to music composed over a hundred years ago, which many still think of as radical.
Ives composed ‘The Fourth of July’ circa 1911-12 and considered it to be one of his best works. It is a sonic train wreck, without a whiff of common-place nostalgia or jingoism. For Ives, however, it was Independence Day in Danbury as he experienced it: an amalgamation of every form of celebration imaginable from the religious to the raucous.
‘Central Park in the Dark’ (1906) is an earlier example of his use of innovative layering and collage techniques. No musical stroll in the park with a listener lulled by an evocation of nocturnal calm, it is the real thing where serenity is constantly interrupted by the sounds of a city alive, ranging from ragtime to the noise and excitement generated by a passing fire engine.
The final work in the first half of the program was Orchestral Set No.2, which Ives compiled around 1919 from material that he composed over the previous decades. Through each of its three movements – ‘An Elegy to Our Forefathers’, ‘The Rockstrewn Hills Join in the People’s Outdoor Meeting’ and ‘From Hanover Square North, at the End of a Tragic Day, the Voices of the People Again Arose’ – course songs of all sorts. The remarkable musical colors and textures are created by a full orchestra augmented by gongs and an accordion. Ives even called for a theremin, an electronic musical instrument controlled without physical contact by the performer.
These three pieces were the most complex and challenging heard in the concert. To each of the disjunct and dense soundscapes, Botstein and TŌN brought clarity of textures, transparent sound and a linear approach to the music line that belied the complexities and technical difficulties.
Ives’s Symphony No.2 was the final piece on the program. Composed from 1897 to 1907, it is the first major work in which he quoted vernacular American songs as well as quotations from his own works. Strains of Dvořák, who spent the better part of three years in America from 1892-95, as well as bits of Beethoven and Wagner can also be heard. Leonard Bernstein championed the symphony and conducted its premiere with the New York Philharmonic on 22 February 1951. Ives, in his mid-seventies at the time, listened to the concert on the radio.
It came almost as a shock to experience this simpler Ives. To a certain extent, Botstein leaned too far into this more accessible music when a bit more grit and energy were in order. Nonetheless, his lyrical approach to the score resulted in some especially fine playing from the orchestra. And leave it to Ives to blow up everything by ending it with the most dissonant chord imaginable. Botstein and TŌN played it big, bold and loud.
Rick Perdian
Featured Image: The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College © Rick Perdian