{"product_id":"multi-artistes_charles-ives-the-anniversary-edition_2024_son","title":"Charles Ives - The Anniversary Edition","description":"To mark the 150th anniversary of the birth of Charles Ives — hailed by his champion Leonard Bernstein as the \"first great American composer,\" who, \"alone in his Connecticut barn, created his own private musical revolution\" — Sony Classical presents the most comprehensive collection of recordings ever published of works by this eccentric and prophetic genius. The 5-CD box set, Charles Ives - The Anniversary Edition, is a unique and provocative introduction, originally released 50 years ago on vinyl under the Columbia Masterworks label, under the artistic direction of Henrietta Condak, to celebrate the Ives centennial.\n\nThe first disc explores \"The Many Faces of Charles Ives\" through eight diverse works recorded between 1964 and 1970: Bernstein conducts the New York Philharmonic in The Fourth of July and The Unanswered Question; General William Booth Enters into Heaven, one of Ives's greatest masterpieces, and The Circus Band are performed by the Gregg Smith Singers; baritone Thomas Stewart sings the moving song In Flanders Fields; organist E. Power Biggs plays Ives's Variations on \"America\"; composer Gunther Schuller conducts The Pond for chamber orchestra; and the Hymn (Largo cantabile) is performed by the New York String Quartet and double bassist Alvin Brehm.\n\nCD 2, The Celestial Country, presents Ives's early cantata of that name, composed between 1897 and 1899 for his conservative composition teacher at Yale, Horatio Parker. It is performed by the Gregg Smith Singers (accompanied by the Columbia Chamber Orchestra), who also perform arrangements of four of Ives's most powerful patriotic songs with the American Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Leopold Stokowski.\n\nThe Things Our Fathers Loved, CD 3, contains 25 of Ives's songs, performed by soprano Helen Boatwright, a specialist in American song. She is accompanied by John Kirkpatrick, who studied and worked closely with Ives and is still considered the most authoritative interpreter of his piano music. In 1974, Gramophone hailed this celebrated recording as \"the best selection ever released\" on vinyl of \"what may well prove to be his most important, characteristic, and consistently inspired work.\"\n\nThe next CD is particularly revealing: Ives Plays Ives presents the composer himself in 1933, 1938, and 1943, playing excerpts from his revolutionary Concord Sonata and shorter piano pieces in the New York recording studio of Mary Howard, Toscanini's sound engineer. In his performance of the slow movement of the Concord Sonata, The Alcotts, a Gramophone critic wrote that Ives's interpretation was \"sincere but objective, a yin and yang quality that discerning performances embrace.\" During three brief excerpts from Emerson, the sonata's first movement, the critic continues, stating that Ives \"provides pianists with a timbral model for the basic sound he imagined: a brutal attack, an intoxicated rhythmic freedom; this is neither the time nor the place for a consciously refined or 'pretty' interpretation.\"\n\nThe final disc in the box set, titled Charles Ives Remembered, is a fascinating collage of oral memories. This was the first documentation of a musical figure using oral history. Over 50 interviews with family members, friends, neighbors, and colleagues create a memorable portrait of this enigmatic figure through the voices of those who knew him best. From memories of Ives's childhood to his years at Yale, through his public career as an insurance executive and his private career as a composer, the memoirs and reflections gathered by award-winning musicologist Vivian Perlis offer a multi-faceted and humanizing view of this enigmatic icon of American music.","brand":"Multi-artistes","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57525705408856,"sku":null,"price":23942877.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"url":"https:\/\/vinyles.com\/en-us\/products\/multi-artistes_charles-ives-the-anniversary-edition_2024_son","provider":"Vinyles.com","version":"1.0","type":"link"}