Once upon a long time ago, there was a corporate record label called Columbia Masterworks that, believe it or not, used some of the profits from its bestsellers to expand the recorded classical repertoire. Sony, the current owner of the Masterworks archive, is now busy compiling box sets from those glory days — and upon the 150th anniversary of his birth in 2024, it was Charles Ives’s turn to receive the big box treatment.
The 22-CD set put out by Sony Classical last fall gathers together most of the Ives recordings that Columbia issued from the years 1945 to 1976 and, for good measure, throws in almost all of the corresponding Ives output from arch-rival RCA Victor, whose archive Sony also now owns. The CDs are packaged in reproductions of the original album covers.
Those decades were a special time for fans of Ives, the original American maverick composer whose messy yet treasure-filled manuscripts were gradually being exhumed, pieced together, and unleashed upon the record-buying public. What we hear in the relatively early recordings is the fresh taste of discovery, with Ives getting in our faces in all of his profound, crazy, ear-stretching, spiritual, nostalgic, and visionary aspects. Further refinements in how performers approached this music would somewhat smooth out those features.
There was just a microscopic amount of Ives available on records before John Kirkpatrick made his pioneering recording of the Piano Sonata No. 2 (“Concord”) in 1945 and William Masselos recorded the Piano Sonata No. 1 in 1950. The set also includes Kirkpatrick’s and Masselos’s stereo remakes of these works from the late 1960s, with Kirkpatrick sounding more assured than before (even adding a few notes) and Masselos more intense.
When Leonard Bernstein’s zesty, slightly cut 1958 recording of the Symphony No. 2 came out, the Ives boom on records really got rolling — and it sounds better than ever in this remastering. (Bernstein’s eloquent lecture on Ives is also included.) Leopold Stokowski and Morton Gould soon got into the act, conducting a number of world premieres. Stokowski, then 83, unveiled the fantastically world-embracing Symphony No. 4 in a pull-out-all-the-stops rendition that is still competitive with newer releases. Gould tackled the early, somewhat tame Symphony No. 1 and the provocative Orchestral Set No. 2. Further into the box, the smoothing-out process can be sensed in Eugene Ormandy’s plush rendering of the Symphony No. 2 with The Philadelphia Orchestra and José Serebrier’s thicker-set Symphony No. 4.
The most valuable ingredients in this set are the albums of Ives’s short, quirky, mostly still-obscure pieces for choruses, singers, small orchestras, and such that Columbia churned out in the 1960s and ’70s. I especially enjoyed the album titled Calcium Light Night, with Gunther Schuller and chamber orchestra surveying many of Ives’s thornier experiments with dissonance, as well as Old Songs Deranged with James Sinclair and the Yale Theater Orchestra, which has some uproariously funny send-ups, like the piece “Gyp The Blood” or Hearst!? Which Is Worst?! And Ives buffs will enjoy finding various Easter eggs buried within the box, like Kirkpatrick’s recording of “In the Inn,” which only existed on a 78 until now, and Bernstein’s The Gong on the Hook and Ladder and The Circus Band March from a long-gone LP box set.
Dig in, folks, before this box goes out of print, too.
