Ives, C: Berceuse

The song recital recorded here brings together five composers of vastly different persuasions. Ives, the inspired maverick, the first composer who captured the "feel" of America in music; Weill, who began life composing important "classical" scores and spent the last ten years of his life writing for movies and Broadway; Rachmaninoff, whose piano concerti and symphonies are known the world over; Strauss, Germany's last all-around genius; and Hugo Wolf, the only one among the five who devoted himself to song, to the exclusion of almost everything else. This recording was made early in Dawn Upshaw’s career after she took the First Prize of the 1985 Walter W. Naumburg Vocal Competition. Since then she has performed all over the world in works from Mozart to Messiaen, on both the opera and concert stage. She has championed contemporary music, giving first performances of over 25 works in the last decade. She has made over 50 recordings and won 4 Grammys.

Considering that Ives lived to be 80 years old the period during which he was most active as one of the most innovative of American composers was remarkably short. His earliest works date from the mid-1890s and by 1930 he was virtually silent.

This late inactivity was possibly engendered by the fact that his works were largely ignored during his lifetime and it wasn't until the mid-1960s that his music gained any kind of recognition. By then he had been dead for ten years.

This is the second Ives disc in this series and the programme here comprises some of Ives's instrumental and vocal music.