Customer Reviews

Ives: Symphony No. 1 / Three Places in New England / Robert Browning Overture ~ Ormandy / Stokowski

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Written at Yale for a grade, Ives: Symphony No. 1 is one of the most consistently underrated of his works. Yes, the constant key changes are a bit of a joke, but for sheer exuberance, nothing else tops it. Horatio Parker must have loved it, and it deserved an Honors, I should think.

Robert Browning is highly experimental and densely textured in the manner of Symphony No. 4, and Stokowski's recording is a sure bet for truth. Browning, the poet, was not Emerson, the mystic. Such an emotional reading cannot be affected, but there is no comparison to the thrilling dizzyness of the First Symphony's final movement.

Ormandy's Three places in New England is also a classic recording. While Ives' Unanswered Question has figured in works from the movie Dead Man to John Adams' elegiac The Transmigration of Souls, Three Places is much less well known.

It's quaint New Englandisms border on the tone poems of Vaughn-Williams (The Housatonic at Stockbridge) while remaining faithful to the bandmaster experiments of his father (Circus Band March).

If none of this makes any sense to you, then just go back to that Symphony No. 1 and its preposterous series of key changes. It always makes me laugh, is never corny and truly showcases the instruments of the modern symphony orchestra. It's not Mahler exactly but just as sublime.

Leonard Bernstein placed his personal stamp on the Ives revival that began after WW II, while his unofficial rival at Columbia Records, Eugene Ormandy, made no impression at all in this music. Or so I carelessly thought. Bernstein never recorded "Three Places in New England," strangely enough, and Ormandy's rendition is full of energy and gorgeous playing -- it will more than do in a pinch. The evocation of mist over the Housatonic River in the third movement isn't diaphanous, but that hardly matters wehn the Philadelphia Sound is spread so lusciously. Putnam's Camp is as raucously jovial as anyone could want.

We also get the two extremes of Ives's evolution, early and late. The other reviewer here loves the lively Sym. #1, which in truth is juvenilia, while I love Stokowski's reading of the turbulent Robert Browning Over., misnamed after a high-Victorian poet and thus giving no hint of the music's freewheeling, untrammeled nature. The Aemrican Sym. isn't first rate, but Stokowski's volcanic energy more than makes up for that. In all, a budget Ives recording that vies with the best on the market, by Bernstein or anyone else.