Ives, C: Grantchester - CD

"Sebastian Gottschick’s adaptations of Ives’ songs and short instrumental pieces in this sense not only pay homage to the composer but develop his work further. The multifaceted ensemble and the instrumentation Gottschick chose allow him to be highly differentiated in his approach to the specific Ives sound that oscillates between crude realism and symbolist fragmentation: he either deliberately avoids this sound (for instance by using a vibraphone in Grantchester) or he pushes it to the point of prismatic refraction. Apart from this, Gottschick’s selection proceeds in a continuous, multi-perspective order that can be interpreted as a drama en miniature, a model of an ordinary day from the snatches of dreams in the morning to the falling night, and finally also as the epitome of the diversity of life itself. Behind all that the power and intangible nature of memories, Ives’ lifelong theme, becomes visible and audible." Wolfgang Rathert

Charles Ives wrote almost two hundred songs. Although his reputation rests on orchestral, chamber and piano music, it is Ives's songs that represent the heart of his creative thinking. The expressive variety encountered is accordingly vast: indeed, the gradual evolution of Ives’s songwriting is analogous to the wider evolution of American music during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This new edition includes all the songs that Ives completed. The alphabetic approach ensures that each volume (of which this disc is the first of six) contains a representative cross-section