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Classical RecordsBy CRAIG PALMERCHARLES IVES: New Music ef Charles Ives: seventeen first recordings lor aolo voice, chorus and chamber orchestra ; Gregg Smith Singers, Columbia Chamber Ensemble; GreggxSmifh conducting; Columbia Maslenvorks MS 7321.The r weedy Ik brie of contemporary music carries the threads of more divergent sources than any of the recent great periods of music . . . any. say since the Baroque period and the turn of the I7fh century revival of Grecian antiquity.One of the most woolly, most homespun arid most mo-hairy of these is the threat of the New York actuarial clerk, later insurance broker, and much later, leading American composer, Charles Ives.Quite something, Ives. Consider him.He was born in 1S74, the same year of Schoenberg's birth.Invention of the telephone was a few years off, as were all four of the Brahms symphonies! Edison had three more years of work before his phonograph would scratch out its first sounds.Peter Yates made a poetic analogy of Ives’ phiosopM cal outlook when he said, “his spiritual education grew from the glacial moraine of Connecticut, rooting in a compost of Thoreau and Emerson.For teachers, Ives came under the careful eye of first his father, bandmaster George Ives. Later, at Yale, he studied with Horatio Parker, another of America’s prominent composers.Important people in his life, because they understood when as a wee budding lad he brought in exercises in quartal harmony!And then there’s Ives' biographers, Henry and Sidney Cowell, and John Kirkpatrick, pianist and a leading exponent of Ives’ music.It was Kirkpatrick who played a principal role in causing Ives' music to be committed to recording. Kirkpatrick recorded the Concorde Sonata (the second piano sonata , . . more or less!) in LJ40 for Columbia, although. Yates notes, it was not released until 1948.And so to Smith.How can a recording like this go wrong?Smith’s ensemble is Fast becoming one of the top choral groups in the country, and a double bonus is Smith's continued affinity for new material. Remember the Soler and the Billings.Most of all, the readings of the choral works (nine “sets or solo songs close the second side) have translucency an important quality when dealing with music potentially as ponderous as this.Though Vm not that infatuated with that style of ver-bratoless singing which Smith deems appropriate* the music still manages to loose itself from earthy ties.As for the sets, by Adrienno Albert, m027.0, and William Feuerstein, baritone, this is where the real jewels of The recordings tie.Miss Albert is best heard in Like A Sick Eagle based on words by John Keats, Flexible throughout her material, here she assumes the most demanding persona!it}’.Feuerstein offers his most convincing credentials in Tolerance” based on a text by Rudvarrl Kipling.This is not to detract from the remainder of the collection, pointing to these songs specifically, but here is fatfht
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Star News
Pasadena, California, US
Sun, Apr 26, 1970
Page 74
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