Two New San Francisco Symphony Recordings Pairing Ives and Copland

Charles Edward Ives (1874-1954) won a Pulitzer Prize in Music in 1947 for his third symphony (Camp Meeting), which premiered the year before and Leonard Bernstein conducted the world premiere of Ives's Second Symphony in a New York Philharmonic live broadcast in 1951, so recognition for Ives came late rather than - or in addition to - posthumously. Aaron Copland, the 20th-century symphonic composer who received the most recognition and performances during his lifetime (1900-1990) praised Ives in print during the 1930s, making him an early admirer

Not only because Ives backdated many of his unpublished compositions (the third symphony to 1904, for instance, the second 1899-1902) I consider him something of a fraud. I find it difficult to maintain concentration on listening to his music, except when it quotes some hymn tune that usually drowses in my memory.

"Three Places in New England" is the orchestral set first performed on February 16, 1930 that was the most programmed Ives music back when Leonard Bernstein was music director of the New York Philharmonic. Ives's music was praised by Arnold Schoenberg, Bernard Hermann, and Elliot Carter, but (despite documented homonegative remarks from Ives) were championed with more effect (that is the effects of finishing scores and having them performed) by gay composers and conductors: Henry Cowell, Copland, Lou Harrison, Bernstein, and Michael Tilson Thomas.

I don't have an explanation for why musicians have championed Ives's music, and am little engaged by the Ives compositions on two live recordings from last year by the San Francisco Symphony, both of which have performances of Copland works that command not only attention, but assent.

The "Companion Concert Recording" of a program on Tilson Thomas's PBS series "Keeping Score" includes the much-loved "Appalachian Spring"-well the suite is much loved, the full 1944 ballet score is considerably less well known. Though the Shaker hymn "Simple Gifts" is the main theme, the title for the ballet and therefore the music came from gay poet Hart Crane's "The Bridge":

O Appalachian Spring! I gained the ledge;
Steep, inaccessible smile that eastward bends
And northward reaches in that violet wedge
Of Adirondacks!

Copland did not know the title when he wrote the music and the "spring" in Crane was water not a season, so Copland was bemused by praise at having captured in music the feeling of springtime in the Appalachians.

Preceding it on the disc is Ives's relatively familiar "Holidays Symphony," also known as "A New England Holiday Symphony." The holidays include one in each of the four seasons:
I. Washington's Birthday (winter)
II. Decoration Day (spring)
III. The Fourth of July (summer)
IV. Thanksgiving (fall)
The first three movements were performed in 1931. Ives claimed the movements were completed in 1909, 1912, 1912, and 1904 respectively.

Ives made something of an aural kaleidoscope of a lot of familiar music (including "Dixie," "Yankee Doodle Dandy," "Taps" and "Columbia, Gem of the Ocean") with his own harmonies, sometimes with different sections of the orchestra playing in different keys at the same time. I suspect that it is more interesting for musicologists to look at than it is for me to hear.

The other new SFS live recording has a splendid performance by Julliard School organ teacher (and roving performer, including here in recital last month) Paul Jacobs of Copland's 1925 Organ Symphony. The playing - both Jacobs's and the orchestra's - is exuberant and nuanced. (The first movement is quite meditative, almost proto-Mesiaen. The scherzo has some resemblance in scoring to Ives, though Copland probably did not yet know of Ives. And I might as well suggest that the finale is proto-Poulenc, and the most obviously related to Copland's time in France studying with Nadia Boulanger, who played the organ part at its New York première.) I think the great Fratelli Ruffatti electro-pneumatic pipe organ in Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall gets too little exercise, but it sounds delighted to be unleashed by Jacobs (as, indeed, it did in his recital, particularly in Reger's "Inferno" fugue and the Bach E-minor fugue; Michael Murray inaugurated the organ with a performance of Copland and Saint-Saens organ symphonies in 1984, btw).

It is preceded by an orchestration be Canadian composer Henry Brant (1913-2008) of Ives's extraordinarily long and difficult Concord piano sonata. Brant did not try to guess how Ives might have orchestrated the music, apportioning it rather conventionally to strings and strings and strings and woodwinds. Brant supplied an Ives-like span of years for his work: 1958 to 1994.

The long (nearly-18 minute) Emerson opening may be apt, because I find it hard not to drift off when I try to read Emerson, too. Including a harp increases the sleep-inducing quality of the movement. The Hawthorne Ives had in mind was the spook-master of some short stories rather than the novelist. The opening sounds Disneyesque to me, but it turns majestic and beautiful about five and a half minutes in, though goblins burst in (brassy ones) after a minute and the music sounds booming in somewhat discordant Sousa-like hallucinations.

The first time I listened to the "Alcotts" section (the shortest, half as long as any of the others) I liked it, but it does not seem to wear well on me. It is dreamy, elegiac, close to "pretty" (an adjective Ives considered an insult, and would probably consider "innocuous" another one). There is what I hear as a sort of waltz tune drifting through in the middle, and some bass drum holding together a climax that begins atonally and fades away (tonally).

The start of the Thoreau section invokes (to me at least) wood sprites. Thoreau played flute, and sometimes performances of the piano sonata include a flautist cameo. What sounds like a Bernard Hermann score might actually be influence by Ives on Hermann. Though I'm not sure what a musical portrait of Thoreau should sound like, I consider his prose often ponderous and overly ebullient (not a combination that appeals to me). Ives's Thoreau dawdles dreamily, which is I guess a common conception of Thoreau.

There is little that makes me want to return to listen again to either of the Ives pieces, and I have the MTT/SFSS studio recording of "Appalachian Spring" on "Copland, the Populist." (with "Rodeo" and "Billy the Kid").

The novelty of the "Concord Symphony" might draw some, but I consider the best reason for acquiring the recording to be the Copland Organ Symphony. (I used to have E. Power Biggs with Bernstein and the NY Philharmonic on vinyl, and have a good recording of Simon Preston with Leonard Slatkin and the St. Louis Symphony of it. Both recordings had other Copland symphonic works with the organ symphony.)

The sonics of the Copland Organ Symphony recording are extra-superb. The audience liked it, but as Artur Rubinstein said of concertgoers (not specifically the standing-ovation-prone current San Francisco one!), they applaud even when the music is played well (as it generally is here, I hasten to add).

(For facts - certainly not opinions - about the music, I have drawn on the liner notes, though they are rather slender, being repeated in French and German.)