The three main works
on this disc are well represented in the catalogue, but these
recordings are pretty famous and have been available over the
years in a number of reincarnations. The selection of shorter
items was new to me and may well prove to be the main point of
interest in this latest reissue.
Bernstein gave the
famous premiere of Ives’ youthful, European-inspired Symphony
No. 2 in 1951, a performance that the elderly composer heard on
a neighbour’s radio. This recording, made a few years later by
Columbia, is live - though that is not mentioned on the ‘sleeve’
- and includes a certain amount of coughing and shuffling. It’s
not too distracting, especially as the orchestral balance is very
close, and is only problematic in very quiet passages. The early
stereo channel separation is quite wide between lower and upper
strings, almost as if the engineers were experimenting with stereo
‘spread’, but the ear soon adjusts. The playing itself has tremendous
vitality, so typical of Bernstein’s recordings with the NYPO of
the 1950s and 1960s. In fact, the main competition in these three
works comes from Bernstein himself in his later digital account
for DG, also ‘live’ with the same orchestra. As with most of his
remakes, tempos are more luxuriant and there is more warmth and
opulence generally. But this first recording teems with energy
and detail; the string playing in the first movement is truly
voluptuous, brass and wind ping out from the texture and the finale
goes along at a real zip. I’ve never been quite convinced by Bernstein’s
insistence on holding the final discord longer than the staccato
that Ives specifies. He does it also in his later remake, and
it has often made me wonder if it was this exaggeration from Bernstein
that caused the composer, reportedly, to get up from his chair
after the broadcast, walk silently to the hearth and spit in the
fire. If you hear it played as Ives intended, say on Michael Stern’s
recording with the Saarbrücken RSO on Col Legno (coupled with
the Universe Symphony), it sounds more suitably abrupt
and less like an orchestral raspberry, which was never in the
composer’s mind when he added the chord in the late 1940s.
The two marvellous
essays in polytonality that follow are also well done. Despite
a slightly tentative start from the strings, The Unanswered
Question has the requisite atmosphere and a wonderfully baleful
trumpet from William Vacchiano. Its companion piece, Central
Park in the Dark, conducted by Ozawa and Peress but ‘supervised’
by Bernstein, is less gripping than the remake but boasts characterful
wind playing. Both suffer from slightly dry, airless recordings
and there is a lot of extraneous noise from the orchestra, shuffling,
clattering of music stands, page turning etc. Again, the remake
shows how orchestras had learnt to respect recording conditions.
The Gunther Schuller
collection was new to me and also has audio question marks, but
the pieces brilliantly illustrate the trajectory that Ives’ style
had taken from that early tonal symphony. The two Tone Roads
are little gems that wouldn’t go amiss in a modern contemporary
music festival. From The Steeples and the Mountains involves
a dissonant brass duet gradually being drowned out by church bells,
Ann Street celebrates a tiny, bustling lane near Wall Street
and the jostling polyrhythms of Over the Pavements reflect,
in the composer’s words ‘the sounds of people going to and fro
... different and changing kinds of beats, times and rhythms ...’
It’s wonderfully wacky and is almost an early musique concrète,
though the weirdest cacophony is saved for zanily-named Chromâtimelôdtune,
realized from a detailed sketch by Schuller in 1962. This is the
world of The Unanswered Question taken to its ‘consonance
versus dissonance’ limit.
The recording quality
here is even drier and closer, and some of the playing by the
unnamed ‘scratch’ ensemble is shaky, but it’s a valuable collection
that is well worth having alongside the more familiar fare. It
has to be said that the later DG disc is now at lower mid-price
and also includes some quirkier short pieces (including Tone
Roads No.1) and is in much better sound, an important factor
in some of these atmospheric scores. This may sway it for some.
Tony Haywood
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