Charles Ives: Symphony No. 2 / The Gong on the Hook & Ladder, or Firemen's Parade on Main Street / Tone Roads No. 1 / Hymn: Largo Cantabile, for String Orchestra / Hallowe'en / Central Park in the Dark / The Unanswered Question

Charles Ives (Artist), Leonard Bernstein (Artist), New York Philharmonic (Artist) | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (July 24, 1990)
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Deutsche Grammophon
• ASIN: B000001GC4
• In-Print Editions: MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #80,343 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)
  • #32 in Music > Classical > Historical Periods > Modern, 20th, & 21st Century > Composers > Ives, Charles

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great American Music Conducted By Great American Conductor, January 18, 2002

By 

A. Michaelson "A. Michaelson" (Bay Area, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Charles Ives: Symphony No. 2 / The Gong on the Hook & Ladder, or Firemen's Parade on Main Street / Tone Roads No. 1 / Hymn: Largo Cantabile, for String Orchestra / Hallowe'en / Central Park in the Dark / The Unanswered Question (Audio CD)

Nobody could conduct American music quite like Leonard Bernstein, and it really shows on this fabulous disc devoted to Ives's Second Symphony and a few of his miniature masterpieces. Bernstein, in both the included essay as well has his conducting, shows that he truly understands Ives's music and what makes it absolutely American. Ives is a rather interesting musical figure because he was not a composer by profession, but rather a businessman who wrote music at any free moment he could get. He tinkered with atonality before Schoenberg and new rythmic structures before Stravinsky, yet his music sounds like neither of aforementioned composers. Ives has a very original, unique musical style. One can't help but visualize turn of the century america when listening to Ives. This music always makes me think of the novels of the great Theodore Dreiser. This is a great place to start or add to an Ives discography. This disc includes one of his most listener friendly compositions, Symphony no. 2 along with some very experimental and fascinating miniatures, including the famous Unanswered Question and the visually stimulating Central Park in the Dark. You cannot go wrong with Ives's original music or Bernstein's amazing performances. Plus the music is in crystal clear digital sound. Though the music was recorded live, it has studio sound and performance all the while keeping the emotion and tension found only in live recordings. This is an exceptional intro to Ives and is highly recommended. (hmm...seeing as how it's 3 am, i wonder if this makes any sense to people reading it.)

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars brilliant idiosyncrasies, May 19, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Charles Ives: Symphony No. 2 / The Gong on the Hook & Ladder, or Firemen's Parade on Main Street / Tone Roads No. 1 / Hymn: Largo Cantabile, for String Orchestra / Hallowe'en / Central Park in the Dark / The Unanswered Question (Audio CD)

Ives was an uncommon, refined distillate. Much like Wallace Stevens, another Connecticut Yankee insurance specialist thoroughly out of step with his environment, Ives's structural and thematic advances foretold radical new worlds. Many liner notes to recent Ives releases talk about his work as if it were like most other orchestral offerings--in reality, few touch upon how cataclysmic and inventive his realizations were.

Bernstein, conversely, grasps Ives in totality and advances the cause of this frighteningly bold new music, both in practice and in writing at length about these scores and the Protean imagination that engendered them. Bravo, Lenny.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Uniquely American Ives Recordings, August 8, 2002

By 

gobirds2 (New England) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Charles Ives: Symphony No. 2 / The Gong on the Hook & Ladder, or Firemen's Parade on Main Street / Tone Roads No. 1 / Hymn: Largo Cantabile, for String Orchestra / Hallowe'en / Central Park in the Dark / The Unanswered Question (Audio CD)

This is great American music in the truest sense. I was nurtured on movie soundtracks and scores from the likes of Bernard Herrmann, Dimitri Tiomkin, Alex North and others. As we have lost many of these composers and music that they may have left us through the years, I have been methodically looking at American "Twentieth Century" composers from the "classical" arena to fill that void from that great era. I discovered Charles Ives after reading up on Aaron Copland and his foray into many diverse areas of musical composition. One thing leads to another. Ives' Symphony No. 2 seems to have come up very frequently. It certainly doesn't have the melodic quality of Copland yet it does seem to have roots resulting in American musical motifs very strangely orchestrated resulting in some twisted profoundness. What attracts me is how the music almost seems as if it were composed for film. The technical qualities of this recording are marvelous. Leonard Bernstein's intuitive and vibrant interpretation of this music is effectively felt.