Charles Ives sounds hale and youthful at 150 with Botstein, The Orchestra Now
Whether one considers Charles Ives an eccentric Yankee tinkerer or the foundational voice of American music or something in between, the rarity of his works on concert programs during this, his 150thanniversary year, is hard to figure. In particular, the American musical organizations that are large and proficient enough to perform his four symphonies and other orchestral pieces—the core works of his oeuvre—have seemed oddly silent on the subject.
But just like nature, conductor Leon Botstein abhors a vacuum. The longtime champion of unjustly neglected repertoire spearheaded an Ives festival at Bard College—where he is also president—and on Thursday brought The Orchestra Now, Bard’s graduate program for aspiring orchestral musicians, to Carnegie Hall for an all-Ives concert titled “Charles Ives’s America.”
For educational value added, the concert was narrated by the distinguished musicologist and Ives authority J. Peter Burkholder. Two noted Ives performers, baritone William Sharp and pianist Donald Berman, were on hand to perform the religious and patriotic songs that got so marvelously distorted and thrown together in Ives’s compositions.
These three and conductor Botstein engaged in a half-hour panel discussion before the concert. Unfortunately a planned fifth participant, the cultural historian Joseph Horowitz, whose books have shed much light on the 19th– and 20th-century America of Ives’s lifetime, was unable to attend.
So the evening’s focus shifted subtly from America to one American, represented by four of his compositions: “The Fourth of July” from the Holidays Symphony, Central Park in the Dark, Orchestral Set No. 2, and Symphony No. 2—a generous and enlightening selection. (Although, to paraphrase a famous remark by the composer’s wife Harmony about a would-be biographer, “How they are going to get Charlie into one concert I don’t know.”)
To aid the getting-into, Prof. Burkholder said a few words before each piece, with musical illustrations provided by orchestra players or the duo of singer Sharp and pianist Berman. For “The Fourth of July,” for example, this introduction consisted of an overview of the Holidays Symphony and a brief demonstration of how Ives began to build an orchestral texture around the tune “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean.”
Botstein then led his players in Ives’ six-minute tableau of a boy’s Fourth, beginning with a murmur of strings supported by resonant double basses, pizzicato and bowed. A dense mat of traditional tunes in various keys accumulated—at least 16 of them, quite unidentifiable individually until “Columbia” emerged triumphant in the trombones, marching toward a massive polytonal explosion of holiday fireworks, with just a few trailing sparks to close the piece pianissimo.
Scarcely longer than “The Fourth” and a good deal quieter, Central Park in the Dark used a similar collage technique to layer night sounds from a gentle breeze in the trees to croaking frogs, a lonely clarinet, a distant siren and a piano banging out a fast rag in a nearby building. Botstein and his players wove their mostly pianissimo nocturne effectively, although the placement of the piano downstage center (where it was needed to illustrate the lecture parts of the program) created an unduly soloistic role for the quick-fingered orchestral pianist Neilson Chen.
More reminiscences, youthful and otherwise, inspired the three movements of Orchestral Set No. 2. After a stout rendition of “Bringing in the Sheaves” by Sharp and Berman, Botstein and the orchestra effectively wove the distinctive atmosphere of each, beginning with the weightless haze of strings, harp and chimes through which one glimpsed distant ancestors in “An Elegy to Our Forefathers.”
Another orchestral pianist, Ryan MacEvoy McCullough, deftly handled the intricate piano part of “The Rockstrewn Hills Join in the People’s Outdoor Meeting,” an evocation of old-time religious gatherings with hymns and dancing that the composer himself called “almost a piano concerto.”
Singer Sharp then read Ives’s account of New Yorkers of all social classes spontaneously breaking into somber hymns on hearing the news of the sinking of MS Lusitania by a German submarine, with hundreds of lives lost. That memory inspired the final movement, “From Hanover Square North, At the End of a Tragic Day, The Voice of the People Again Arose,” beginning with a tune in low woodwinds, then horns and piano chords and a surge of strings stirring up a polytonal fog, which cleared at last for a hymn tune fortissimo, followed by another Ives sudden pianissimo ending.
Following intermission, Ives scholar Burkholder introduced the Symphony No. 2, citing Ives’s writings and his use of the Stephen Foster songs “Camptown Races” and “Old Black Joe” in the symphony as evidence of Ives’s “compassion for African Americans.” Sharp and Berman performed the latter song tenderly and adagio. Then, by way of an encore, they gave a stirring rendition of a classic Ives song unrelated to the symphony, “The Circus Band,” Sharp letting his brawny baritone rip and Berman at last demonstrating his impressive chops at the keyboard.
Following the polytonal puzzle pieces of the concert’s first half, the Second Symphony, though nearly contemporary with them, came off as a surprisingly conventional tribute to the symphonic masters of Ives’s youth, Brahms and Dvořák. No doubt it was the use of recognizable American tunes, along with harmonic twists and playful dissonances, that prompted Prof. Burkholder to pronounce this work “as steeped in American soul as Huck Finn.”
The symphony’s opening for strings alone cantered along like a slightly cockeyed Dvořák serenade. Trombones slipped in with a murmured “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean,” woodwinds gathered for “Bringing in the Sheaves,” and thus Ives had the materials for his movement in sonata form. On Thursday, musical interest flagged a little during a long stretch of softly curling strings and woodwinds, but returned with a hearty Brahmsian mix of brass and flutes.
The Allegro molto con spirito movement danced nicely to “Sheaves” and another tune, with woodwinds fluttering gaily and dissonantly in the breeze. It bogged down a bit in repetitious phrases, but then a curiously modulating crescendo kept things interesting until the abrupt end.
Strings nicely shaped the long, dissonantly harmonized theme of the Adagio cantabile, as glowing low brass and the soft beat of pizzicato cellos evoked Brahms, and swelling strings suggested a polytonal Tchaikovsky.
There was even a touch of Sibelius grandeur in the long strides of the Lento maestoso leading to the finale, but then Ives showed his true American colors in snatches of “Columbia” and “Camptown” tossed about the orchestra, and fast Yankee fiddling got faster, relieved only by a horn intoning “Old Black Joe.” A fugato on “Camptown,” a sudden attenuation down to mere wisps of strings and flute, and a kitchen-sink crescendo led at last to an entire chorus of “Camptown Races” blazing out fortissimo amid a polytonal commotion, and finally the symphony’s notorious ending, a sudden cutoff in the middle of a trumpet blowing “Reveille.”
Did Botstein and his young players realize all Ives’s gnarly scores with pinpoint accuracy? That was hard to judge, amid the fog of Ivesian memory. But this Thursday night they certainly got the spirit of Charlie, dreamy or raucous, into a concert.
The Orchestra Now, conducted by Leon Botstein, will perform selections from Wagner’s Parsifal with projected artwork from the exhibition Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300–1350, Dec. 8 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. ton.bard.edu
2 Responses to “Charles Ives sounds hale and youthful at 150 with Botstein, The Orchestra Now”
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Posted Nov 23, 2024 at 8:36 am by Larry Malloy
I went to this concert as well and was looking forward, in particular, to hearing the rarely played 2nd Orchestral Set, which I think is a true masterpiece. It was wonderful to hear the brilliant William Sharp perform songs Ives used in the piece, but I’m afraid the performance by the orchestra left much to be desired, at least to my senses.
I’m not sure how it’s possible to make this great music dull, but Maestro Botstein managed to do so in every piece. It was simply stultifying. Mr. Wright asks if the scores were realized with “pinpoint accuracy.” That is the LAST thing Ives ever needs. What his music demands is energy, life, daring, joy, mystery, tenderness, and passion. There was none of that here and it’s a shame.
It’s truly unfortunate that this appears to have been the only Ives orchestra concert in New York City during his 150th anniversary. Where were the NY Philharmonic and all the other orchestras coming in to Carnegie Hall this year? Where was the Fourth Symphony, another masterpiece, and other performances of the great 2nd Orchestral Set, not to mention “Three Places in New England” and other “Holidays” movements? Truly disheartening.
Posted Nov 26, 2024 at 6:07 pm by David Hayes
In response to the dearth of Ives performances in New York during this 150th Anniversary year – I concur with Mr. Malloy’s dismay. The general passing over of this most important American composer during a significant anniversary year is mystifying.
I will note, however, that the Mannes Orchestra (of which I am the Music Director) performed the Fourth Symphony in March of 2024 at Alice Tully Hall in celebration of Ives during his anniversary year.