Ives, C: The Side Show

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.

Tenor Robert White sings 28 romantic songs spanning the century by both native American and immigrant composers, from Amy Beach in 1899 to Marc Marder's Walt Whitman setting of 1996. There are many favourites (or 'favorites') here from the musical stage, including Friml's Rose Marie and Victor Herbert's Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life. Malotte's famous setting of The Lord's Prayer is also included. The title of the CD is taken from Samuel Barber's beautiful setting of James Agee (the poet of Knoxville, Summer of 1924).

The accompanying booklet is packed with anecdotes from Robert White's personal acquaintance with the majority of the composers represented. Several of the songs were actually written specially for him to sing.

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 fourth of six) contains a representative cross-section

“These songs, with all their quirks and flights of fantasy, [are] among the most important of the 20th century in any language.” The Guardian