The Charles Ives Sesquicentennial

The 150th anniversary of Charles Ives' birth was just a few weeks ago. This post revisits the many early recordings of his music that have appeared here over the years.

The sound of all the six LPs has been completely refurbished, the scans have been redone and added if missing, and many contemporary reviews have been included.

The albums range from the celebrated (Patricia Travers in the Sonata No. 2, John Kirkpatrick in the Concord Sonata) to obscure (the Polymusic disc with orchestral and chamber premieres) to the forgotten (the first two recordings of the Symphony No. 3, the first of Three Places in New England). Just as Ives is an important figure, these early efforts - almost all made while he was alive - are worth hearing and remembering as well.

Here is a brief description of what has appeared, along with links to the original posts and the files themselves. These are presented roughly in chronological order of the recording date. At the end of the post I have added information about a new post on my other blog of a few Ives recordings from 78 that I have cleaned up from Internet Archive. The LPs are all from my collection.

Ives - Piano Sonata No. 2 (Concord, Mass., 1840-1860)

John Kirkpatrick, piano

Recorded April 9, 1945

This famous recording was a major impetus to Ives' renaissance. Kirkpatrick had premiered the work in 1939, whereupon critic Lawrence Gilman called it "the greatest music composed by an American, and the most deeply and essentially American in impulse and implication."

LINK to post

LINK to file

Ives - Violin Sonata No. 2

Sessions - Duo for violin and piano

Patricia Travers, violin, Otto Herz, piano

Recorded April 17, 1950 (Ives) and September 19, 1950

The hugely talented Patricia Travers made these commanding first recordings but quit performing just a few years later. Composer Arthur Berger wrote the Sessions "is invested with just the right amount of repose - revealing intrinsic beauties I had only vaguely suspected it of having. The Ives, by contrast, which has been played in a rambling fashion, ruminating over the hymn-tune and the country-dance, takes on remarkable shape in her reading."

LINK to post

LINK to file

Ives - Symphony No. 3, The Camp Meeting

National Gallery Orchestra/Richard Bales

Recorded August 6, 1950

This earliest recording of the third symphony was received cordially, more for the music perhaps than the performance. Berger wrote that the work "was prophetic of the hymn-tune style Copland and Thomson later developed as one means of being American in idiom. Though prophetic, it is far more conservative than the next Ives symphony. It goes on too long at too even a temper, but certain given sections ... must be considered music of quality."

LINK to post

LINK to file

Ives - Scherzo - Over the Pavements, The Unanswered Question, Hallowe'en, Central Park in the Dark Some 40 Years Ago

Polymusic Chamber Orchestra/Vladimir Cherniavsky

Ives - Violin Sonata No. 2

Elliot Magaziner, violin, David Glazer, piano

Ives - Trio for Violin, Clarinet and Piano

Elliot Magaziner, violin, David Weber, clarinet, David Glazer, piano

Recorded summer 1951

This LP comprised first recordings except for the violin sonata, which Patricia Travers had released the year before. The reviewer for The New Records raved about it at the time: "To hear this music, not once but several times, is to have a new and wonderful experience. Imagine what would have been said in 1908! ... The demands on the musicians are great and they answer that challenge with much skill and conviction."

LINK to post

LINK to file

Ives - Three Places in New England

American Recording Society Orchestra/Walter Hendl

McBride - Violin Concerto

Maurice Wilks, violin, Vienna Symphony/Walter Hendl

Recorded in 1952

The first recording of a important Ives work was coupled with an concerto trifle. But the Ives was admired. Here's Arthur Berger: "An atmosphere and orchestral invention comparable to Berg's is often the background to a simple, homely folk tune. The work as a whole is Ives at his very best, and is one of the significant landmarks in American music." Hendl and the orchestra are excellent.

LINK to post

LINK to file

Ives - Symphony No. 3, The Camp Meeting

Donovan - Suite for String Orchestra and Oboe

Baltimore Little Symphony/Reginald Stewart; Alfred Genovese, oboe, in the Suite

Recorded March 12, 1955

While longing for a recording of the fourth symphony, Saturday Review's Berger lamented "we must be content with his Third Symphony, which Stewart did well to record in Baltimore ... now that the older [i.e., Bales] version has been withdrawn. Richard Donovan's suite for strings and oboe on the overside is a serious effort, robust and motory, but a bit short on ideas in the finale."

LINK to post

LINK to file

Early Recordings led by Nicolas Slonimsky and Werner Janssen

My other blog is offering a few 78 transfers that I cleaned up from Internet Archive originals. These include music of Ives and Carl Ruggles conducted by Nicolas Slonimsky in 1934, and a 1949 Ives disc from Werner Janssen leading a Los Angeles orchestra.

LINK to post

Ives and Sessions with Patricia Travers

When Patricia Travers died several years ago, her obituary in the New York Times melodramatically termed her the "violinist who vanished."

But Travers herself did not disappear, rather she abandoned a career that had recently transitioned from child prodigy to an uncertain future as an adult soloist.

As the Times relates, "In her early 20s, for the Columbia label, she made the first complete recording of Charles Ives’s Sonata No.2 for Violin and Piano, a modern American work requiring a mature musical intelligence. Not long afterward, she disappeared."

Patricia Travers

This is the recording that the newspaper mentions. It and the Sessions Duo for Violin and Piano were taped in April 1950, but she was in fact active for at least a few years thereafter. In June 1952 Columbia had her record another modern American work, Norman Dello Joio's Variations and Capriccio, with the composer at the piano.

On the evidence of this LP, Travers was certainly up to the task of rendering the first recorded performance of Ives's characteristic sonata and Sessions's knotty Duo. Composer Arthur Berger wrote in the Saturday Review that she gives the music "the kind of treatment the big names reserve for the 

standard classics. The Sessions work, which I had always regarded as an over-restless, tense piece, is invested with just the right amount of repose - revealing intrinsic beauties I had only vaguely suspected it of having. The Ives, by contrast, which has been played in a rambling fashion, ruminating over the hymn-tune and the country-dance, takes on remarkable shape in her reading."

These works were perhaps a relief after the showpieces that typically are allotted to the child virtuoso. Perhaps remarkably, perhaps not considering what shows up on YouTube, you can see the 20-year-old Travers perform a bit of the Carmen Fantasy in a 1948 German newsreel.

Travers never did explain her "disappearance." It is left for us to speculate, and I will only note my own opinion that no one should be induced to give up their childhood and adolescence to public performance and scrutiny, which can deplete the resources of even the most well-adjusted adult.

Her cohort on this 10-inch LP is the well-known accompanist Otto Herz. The sound is excellent. This is Travers's only recording, save for the Dello Joio.

Note (November 2024): this has now been remastered in ambient stereo. The download includes complete scans and contemporary reviews.

LINK to Ives and Sessions

Two Early Recordings of Ives' Third Symphony

The third symphony of Charles Ives had to wait about 40 years before its first public performance in 1947, but within the next decade it had earned the two commercial recordings, presented here.

Ives had written the symphony circa 1904, basing it on earlier organ compositions. He revised it later in that decade. But it wasn't until Lou Harrison and the New York Little Symphony took it up in 1946 that it gained notice and a subsequent Pulitzer Prize.

The young Charles Ives

The first recording was led by Richard Bales and his National Gallery Orchestra on August 6, 1950. A local publicly supported radio station, WCFM, issued it on its own label.

This was followed in 1955 in a version for the Vanguard label by the Baltimore Little Symphony and Reginald Stewart.

Richard Bales

Both are worth hearing; the Bales recording made while Ives was still alive, and the Stewart shortly after his death. Bales leads what sounds like a very small orchestra in a careful rendition. The Stewart reading is smoother.

The symphony is sometimes called The Camp Meeting, and the movements "Old Folks Gatherin'," "Children's Day" and "Communion." I don't believe that the documentation for either recording mentions this.

Composer-critic Arthur Berger wrote that the work "was prophetic of the hymn-tune style Copland and Thomson later developed as one means of being American in idiom. Though prophetic, it is far more conservative than the next Ives symphony. It goes on too long at too even a temper, but certain given sections ... must be considered music of quality."

For his fill-up, Bales chose his own arrangement of "Music of the American Revolution," which has less to do with the revolution and more to do with the apparent evidence that all the pieces that Bales arranged were once heard by George Washington. They are pleasant.

Reginald Stewart

Stewart selected a neoclassical Suite for Strings and Oboe by the fine American composer Richard Donovan. Alfred Genovese is the soloist.

While longing for a recording of the fourth symphony, Berger lamented "we must be content with his Third Symphony, which Stewart did well to record in Baltimore (Vanguard 468) now that the older [i.e., Bales] version has been withdrawn. Richard Donovan's suite for strings and oboe on the overside is a serious effort, robust and motory, but a bit short on ideas in the finale."

Both covers include imagery of colonial churches, which must have been considered the right approach for Ives, who had been an organist in a Presbyterian church. The Vanguard artwork is by Rockwell Kent, like Ives a transcendentalist. Kent's sketches graced other Vanguard covers of the time.

Good sound on both. 

Note (November 2024): These recordings have now been remastered in ambient stereo. The download includes complete scans and a number of reviews.

LINK to Bales recording

LINK to Stewart recording

John Kirkpatrick's First Ives Recording

Pianist John Kirkpatrick was possibly the most influential musician in establishing Charles Ives' reputation in prewar America.

Kirkpatrick was the first to play the complete Concord Sonata in a public performance, in 1939, and the first to record it, in this 1949 LP transfer of an April 1945 rendition for Columbia. In 1968, the same record company had Kirkpatrick set down a stereo version.

Reacting to one of the first public performances, the New York Herald-Tribune's Lawrence Gilman was effusive both about composer and pianist. He called the sonata "the greatest music composed by an American, and the most deeply and essentially American in impulse and implication," while adding that Kirkpatrick was "a poet and master, an unobtrusive minister of genius."

The pianist must have deeply identified with the music, which was an homage to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, the Alcotts and Henry David Thoreau, evoking the spirit of transcendentalism.

This is the second in a series of early recordings of the music of Ives. The sound is good. Note (November 2024): this has now been remastered in ambient stereo. The download includes complete scans and contemporary reviews.

LINK to Concord Sonata

Early Recordings of Charles Ives' Music

In response to my recent report of early recordings of the music of Edgard Varèse, longtime blog reader David Federman asked me if I had this pioneering 1951 record of Charles Ives' music. Not only do I have it, I had already transferred it for presentation here.

The LP, on the short-lived Polymusic label, was made when Ives was still alive (he died in 1954, at age 79). At the time, his reputation was growing. He had won the Pulitzer Prize in 1947 (even though he stopped composing in 1930), and such advocates as Bernard Herrmann, John Kirkpatrick, Nicholas Slonimsky, Lou Harrison and Helen Boatwright were programming his music.

Nonetheless, recordings were few and the music was still little known. Most of the performances in this album are first editions, possibly all of them except for the second violin sonata, which Patricia Travers had done for Columbia in 1950. These include such pieces as "The Unanswered Question" and "Central Park in the Dark," which are today far more familiar than they were then.

These and the other orchestral works are led by Vladimir Cherniavsky. I had not encountered his name before, so did some research. Online sources generally suggest that the name "Vladimir Cherniavsky" is a pseudonym for Will Lorin. But when I looked deeper, I found that it is actually the other way around.

Ives in his back yard, 1951

I believe that Vladimir Cherniavsky was the birth name of a composer-conductor-writer who was the son of another composer-conductor, Joseph Cherniavsky (or Josef Cherniafsky). The elder Cherniavsky was associated with the Yiddish theater and made a number of records in the 1920s. The younger Cherniavsky first shows up as a composer of a piece presented by one of the radio orchestras on air in the early 40s. He then disappears until this 1951 session.

Cherniavsky thereafter apparently made his living under the name Will Lorin, both as a writer and composer-conductor. Among his credits were working with Duke Ellington to adapt "A Drum is a Woman" for television in 1956, and providing the musical backing for Harry Belafonte's "An Evening with Belafonte" in 1957. In 1960, Lorin wrote the incidental music for the Broadway play Send Me No Flowers. Less auspiciously, he put together a 1963 General Electric industrial record called "Music to Drill Oil Wells By".

Elliot Magaziner

On the Ives LP, Cherniavsky leads an orchestra of New York studio musicians. Performing the violin sonata are Elliot Magaziner, who played in the CBS television orchestra, and pianist Frank Glazer. Joining them for the Largo is clarinetist David Weber.

The LP is a fine accomplishment, considering the music was all but unknown at the time and is highly individualistic. The reviewer for The New Records wrote at the time: "To lear this music, not once but several times, is to have a new and wonderful experience. Imagine what would have been said in 1908! ... The demands on the musicians are great and they answer that challenge with much skill and conviction."

The album is labeled Volume One, but I can't find any evidence that it was succeeded by other volumes. The sound is excellent.

Note (November 2024): this has now been remastered in ambient stereo. The download includes complete scans and contemporary reviews.

LINK to early Ives recordings

First Recording of Ives' Three Places

It's been a while since we had a post of American music. This is a notable one - it includes the first recording of Charles Ives' best known composition, Three Places in New England. This was one of the few Ives recordings to be made in the composer's lifetime.

The orchestra, which may be the Vienna Symphony under another name, plays this difficult music quite well under the leadership of the talented Walter Hendl. His fluid approach seems to suit this music, which can sound overblown with so many things are going on at once.

Walter Hendl

With Ives' music, it helps to have a scorecard, and there is an excellent article on this composition on Wikipedia.

The violin concerto by Robert McBride is a complete contrast. Breezy and virtuosic, it is nicely played by Maurice Wilk, who was active as a soloist, chamber player, and studio musician. This surely must be the only concerto whose three movements are subtitled in show-biz lingo a la Variety - "Sock 10-G," "Lush PixWix," and "B.O. Hypo." McBride taught at the University of Arizona and is perhaps best known for the Mexican Rhapsody that Howard Hanson recorded. He passed away only last year, as did Hendl.

A Classical Discography does identify the orchestra for the McBride as the Vienna Symphony. The sessions were in 1952.

This disk was issued in the same grant-funded American Recording Society series as the first record we featured on this blog a few months ago.

LINK to Ives and McBride