Ives: Symphony No. 3

A case in point is the Naxos critical-edition releases of the music of Charles Ives. The CD under consideration here is the second in a series. (The first was the recording of the Ives 2nd Symphony and the Robert Browning Overture, with Kenneth Schermerhorn and the Nashville Symphony Orchestra.) There is no issue regarding royalty or production-values shortcuts with these CDs, nor is there any about the authoritativeness of the performances or the sound quality. Any full-price label would be proud of such releases.

The main work here is Ives's Symphony No. 3, written in 1901–1904 but never performed until 1946, with Lou Harrison conducting the New York LIttle Symphony. The following year the Symphony won Ives the Pulitzer Prize for music. It might well not have happened. A Columbia University student recorded the work off his radio during the Harrison broadcast, and played it for interested Columbia musicians, by way of which notice got to the Pulitzer committee. (While this series of events came perilously close to "almost didn't happen" status, there is another event, not as well-documented but more fascinating for what might have been. In 1910, when Gustav Mahler was the music director of the New York Philharmonic-Symphony, he visited Ives's copyist in New York and apparently left the shop with a "fair copy" of this score. Within a year, Mahler was dead. We can only guess how Ives's musical fortunes might have been different, had Mahler performed this work.)

The Third Symphony is the first of Ives's symphonies to totally break free of the Germano-centric traditions instilled in him by his father and by Horatio Parker, his mentor at Yale. It is uniquely "American," and couldn't have been written by anyone other than Ives, yet it lacks the iconoclastic idiosyncrasies usually attributed to Ives. (It may well be these features which attracted Mahler's attention.) Because of this, it may well be his most accessible work for the Ives newcomer. It is certainly one of his gentlest and most serene works, aided in good part by Ives choosing to lightly score it for small chamber orchestra.

Over the years, I've had several recordings of this work, going all the way back to Howard Hanson and the Eastman-Rochester Orchestra and including all the well-regarded ones by Bernstein and Tilson Thomas. (I've never been able to warm up to Tilson Thomas's Concertgebouworkest recording. To me, despite his obvious Ivesian knowledge, the performance just doesn't catch fire; the Dutchmen just don't seem to "get it.") None of them can match this new effort by James Sinclair (and the British Northern Sinfonia is not a handicap to him). This is a pellucid performance of great warmth and transparency, nicely flowing and lyrical as it should be. I especially enjoy the "retouchings" done by Sinclair in judiciously restoring some – but not all – of the "shadow lines" (submerged, much softer chromatic lines that Ives had penciled in for Harrison's premiere performance which were overlooked when Harrison premiered the work and prepared its initial publication). The effect on the richness of the music is subtle but telling. And – at the end of the work – where Ives has chimes softly tolling in the background – these chimes are rendered perfectly; almost subliminally as I would guess had been Ives's intent. Sinclair's recording immediately goes to the top of my list for best realization of this quintessential Ives work.

The rest of the album, while more along the lines of what most think of when they think of Ives the iconoclastic, collage-like composer, is, performance-wise, all of a piece with the symphony. One of Ives's true masterpieces – "The Unanswered Question" – sounds as well as I've ever heard it. Ives revised this early work well after its premiere, altering the trumpet line so that it sounds more "engimatic." Sinclair takes this a mild step further, splitting the "answering" notes assigned by Ives to four flutes into pairs of flutes and clarinets. It adds a bit to the coloration, and in reality provides not a second, but a third, version of this masterpiece.

The other "fillers" are equally splendid. Sinclair's "Central Park in the Dark" also goes to the top of my list for this impressionistic, near-atonal work. Much of Ives's music is all about space and distance, and the bar-room piano heard very faintly in the background truly gives this sense of space, as well as a sense of evening mist in the park. Superb!

There is s duplicate of a work Sinclair has recorded before, on the Koch Classics label: The "Country Band March." There's little to choose between them: They finish in a dead heat. Even the poor lone saxophone at the end, who failed to finish with the rest of the band.

The booklet notes are beyond superb. It didn't take long, reading into the notes, for me to guess who wrote them: The style, detail, and warmth with which the author wrote were dead giveaways. When I turned to p. 4, there it was: Jan Swafford, who wrote the sympathetic Ives biography, "Charles Ives: A Life With Music." (Strangely, though, Swafford fails to mention either the Pulitzer or the possible Ives–Mahler connection, something of only endnote merit in his biography but of continuing fascination to me.)

I can only heap more praise on top of my earlier praise of the Schermerhorn/Nashville CD in terms of the attention that Naxos lavishes on these releases. They don't HAVE to do it this way. But I sure am glad that they do.