This is vintage Ives, a kind of source book presenting his ideas and involvements in various chamber orchestra dimensions. The classic is Three Places in New England, which has been available recorded in one version or another since 1953. I got to know the first American recording, which Howard Hanson made for Mercury with the Eastman-Rochester Orchestra in 1957: many later performances were inferior in atmosphere and excitement and it still stands up well. Ives was essentially a New Englander, steeped in the landscape and its history. He developed a unique way of photographing events by capturing them in sound. The first movement of Three Places depicts a statue on Boston Common—Colonel Robert G. Shaw who led a black regiment in the Civil War—and the second is a fantasy based on actual July 4th celebrations and past history. Only the last movement is personal—a walk Ives took with his wife beside the Housatonic River at Stockbridge where the sound of the water overwhelms that of hymn-singing from the church. Both James Sinclair and Michael Tilson Thomas (DG) understand the superimposed textures handled with such originality. In these more complex passages in Ives there are always differences of balance between recordings. In Three Places, Sinclair is slower than Tilson Thomas in the first movement, but faster for the second. I like the extra zip in the latter, but the former stretches things out, even though Ives marked it with a very slow tempo, possibly too slow to retain any kind of march atmosphere. In the last movement Tilson Thomas gives prominence to the cello line immediately whereas Sinclair, or his engineers, find this a few bars later. But both performances are excellent and well recorded.
The main attraction of Sinclair's recording with the Orchestra New England is that it offers some works for the first time—Postlude in F, the Set of Four Ragtime Dances and Yale-Princeton Football Game—as well as first recordings in the Charles Ives Society critical edition of many of the other pieces. There are many cross-references between the works on the disc and other, better-known, works by Ives. Tune-spotters can have a field day. Thus the Ragtime Dances are related to the First Piano Sonata; the Country Band March is the first version of ''Putnam's Camp'' (the second movement of Three Places) and this tune crops up in the Concord Sonata as well as the Fourth Symphony. In the Set for Theatre Orchestra the first movement, ''In the Cage'', is also a song and the second movement, ''In the Inn'', is closely linked to the equivalent movement in the First Piano Sonata. Not all these derivations are given in the notes. They enrich the music but the sheer fun of the ragtime pieces stands on its own exultantly. The Country Band March scores the natural behaviour of amateurs sight reading—wrong entries, wrong clefs, wrong accidentals—and it ends with an alto sax left on its own, late! (Sinclair omits the final tonic chord given in his own 1975 edition of this work.)
Ives is not all fun and baseball games. The wondrous transcendentalism of the Largo Cantabile: Hymn proves that and if anyone doubted his credentials the Wagnerian Postlude in F, written at 15, scored later, would be ample reassurance. James Sinclair is one of a number of Ives scholars who have been working on the manuscripts at Yale University for many years. With Ives it is not just a matter of playing the score. Materials usually require realization because of the state of the scores—pages may be missing, illegible or sketchy. Both Sinclair and Kenneth Singleton are represented here as editors. Their work has an authorititative authenticity both in the realizations and the performances. This disc is a welcome extension of the Ives canon carried out in the spirit of the composer—and supported by that veteran of Ives scholarship and performance, John Kirkpatrick. It makes compelling listening right through.'