I welcomed the first two volumes of the complete songs and tried to readjust to a situation where Ives is represented by a mass of Victoriana as well as his groundbreaking innovations. Vols 3 and 4 also have a large cast of singers, many of whom work in opera. I am becoming uneasy about this decision since some songs emerge as over-projected and some of the singers have too much vibrato for concert songs of this kind.

Robert Gardner is again outstanding – his “The Indians” luxuriates in the mesmeric, visionary quality associated with Ives at his most personal. He’s excellent too in the near-Sprechstimme of “Like a Sick Eagle”. Again in “Lincoln the Great Commoner” Gardner is monumental and sturdy, worthy of the subject. Patrick Carfizzi sounds rather brutal in “In Flanders Fields”, the First World War song performed for a group of Ives’s business colleagues with disastrous effect.

Robert Gardner begins Vol 4 with the epic philosophical declamation “The Majority” and battles his way splendidly through the fisticuffs of the tone-clusters. This was the first song of Ives’s privately published 114 Songs in 1922 – everyone was totally baffled.

I noted the eccentric choice of the fine countertenor Ian Howell in the first two volumes but I am less convinced by some of his songs here. In both these volumes the songs where Ives set a text in German – probably a student exercise – and later replaced it with English are performed twice, not always together. “My Native Land” is even performed three times by three different singers: the recent new edition provides alternatives for performers to make their own choices in a single song. Leah Wool is not nimble enough in “Memories” and this song should not have been divided into two separate tracks. Gardner is terrific again in “An Election”, Ives’s own ever-topical cynical text about the 1920 presidential contest. Kenneth Tarver misses the satirical element against academics in “The One Way” but “On the Antipodes” comes over splendidly with Ryan MacPherson and duet pianists Douglas Dickson and Laura Garritson. And Sumi Kittelberger delivers an atmospheric “Over all the Treetops”, having performed it in German on the previous CD.

As in popular music of the period, Ives’s Victoriana contains quite a lot of mother songs as well as coy love songs with some dreadfully sentimental texts. So these volumes are a mixed bag and as far as I’m concerned the jury is out on this side of little-known early Ives. I’ll come back to it when I’ve heard the whole collection.