Violinist Augustin Hadelich embarks on an American Road Trip, travelling the musical highways and by ways of his adoptive homeland in the company of pianist Orion Weiss. The duo perform works by a melting pot of American composers, writing in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries and drawing on a diversity of idioms, influences and inspirations... from European Romanticism to revivalist hymns; from blues and jazz to bluegrass; from the banjo and ukulele to Jimi Hendrix's guitar, and from a little Mexican star to exquisite Japanese carvings. Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Charles Ives and John Adams take their place beside Amy Beach, Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, Eddie South, Howdy Forrester, Manuel M. Ponce and - flying the flag for today's composers along with Adams - Daniel Bernard Roumain and Stephen Hartke. Augustin Hadelich, born in Italy to German parents, moved to the USA at the age of 19 to study at New York's Juilliard School and became an American citizen in 2014. In the words of The Strad magazine, "Hadelich's playing brings together the best qualities of both American and European playing: passion, Polish and coherence, but also thoughtfulness, expressivity and nuance."

Discover the brilliance of the iconic John Neumeier in this captivating double feature. The Glass Menagerie, inspired by Tennessee Williams' poignant drama, showcases Neumeier's extraordinary talent for storytelling through movement. At the center of this production is renowned ballet dancer Alina Cojocaru, who inspired John Neumeier to create the piece. Together with the acclaimed Hamburg Ballet, she delivers a performance that dances on the heartstrings and lingers in the soul. Complementing this masterpiece is John Neumeier - A Life for Dance, Andreas Morell's intimate documentary that offers a glimpse into the passion and vision of one of the greatest choreographers of our time. This edition is a must-have for dance enthusiasts and lovers of profound artistic expression.

Discover the brilliance of the iconic John Neumeier in this captivating double feature. The Glass Menagerie, inspired by Tennessee Williams' poignant drama, showcases Neumeier's extraordinary talent for storytelling through movement. At the center of this production is renowned ballet dancer Alina Cojocaru, who inspired John Neumeier to create the piece. Together with the acclaimed Hamburg Ballet, she delivers a performance that dances on the heartstrings and lingers in the soul. Complementing this masterpiece is John Neumeier - A Life for Dance, Andreas Morell's intimate documentary that offers a glimpse into the passion and vision of one of the greatest choreographers of our time. This edition is a must-have for dance enthusiasts and lovers of profound artistic expression.

This is a splendid set of Ives classics with two novelties. It says something forhis stature these days that this is the fifth recording of Three Places in New England in the current British catalogue. The opening march is slightly disappointing in Slatkin's over measured treatment, but there are plenty of fireworks (literally, since it depicts a Fourth of July outing) in ''Putnam's Camp'' and real intensity in the sound of hymn-singing across the river which is built into ''The Housatonic at Stockbridge''.

It is good to have The Unanswered Question and Central Park in the Dark where they belong—together. The separate layers of activity in both pieces, with the strings static and the other instrumental textures dynamically changing, create the quintessential Ives experience in the simplest form. The spacing is carefully engineered in this recording and the detail at all levels is clear.

I have compared the Tilson Thomas recording of the Third Symphony unfavourably with that by Sir Neville Marriner. Slatkin, in this third recording in the British catalogue, now has the edge on both of them, with an affectionate treatment of this hymn-saturated score. Tilson Thomas used a new edition. I think Slatkin does too, and there are extras in the strings at the end of the second movement which I have never heard before.

The two novelties are both early, from the 1890s. The March is all infectious razzle-dazzle and the Fugue in four keys is experimental for its period but smoothly contrived and haunting in its ending. They complete a well planned and competitive Ives release.

-- Peter Dickinson, Gramophone [4/1993]

First issued here for the centenary of Ives's birth, this performance, with its sound quality somewhat improved, is welcome back. Symphony No. 4 is among the great works of American music and one of the most remarkable things that Ives ever did. Serebrier, born in Uruguay of Russian and Polish parents, understands this music well, especially the last two movements where much of the symphony's weight lies. He was, of course, one of Stokowski's assistant conductors at the New York first performance in 1965.

This interpretation, however, is by no means an echo of Stokowski's (CBS 77424, 9/74—part of a four-LP set). For example, and as MM pointed out when Serebrier's recording first appeared, the second movement's representation of chaos resolves quite differently. It is reassuring that this performance is at its most impressive in the visionary last movement, although on a more mundane level one has to point out that at 32'44" the overall playing time is not generous.

-- Gramophone [9/1985, reviewing the LP release, Chandos 1118]

For this third volume in an Ives series that Sir Andrew Davis and his Melbourne Orchestra have already made globally popular, Jean-Efflam Bavouzet takes on the challenge of the solo piano part in Symphony No. 4. The work is famous for its ubiquitous difficulties, not least the apparent impossibility of realizing many of the composer's creative intentions in a live performance, as evidenced by the forty pages of background discussion and practical advice to conductors that introduce the published score. It is complemented by the less-often-performed triptych Orchestral Set No. 2 and the Pulitzer Prize winning Symphony No. 3. This album is a "must-have" for anyone who wants to experience this monumental music under optimal conditions.

This is an album of first-rate contemporary American works for violin piano, with superb performances by Pia Liptak, violin, and Yi-Wen Chang, piano. Pia Liptak: Fantasy; Charles Ives: Second Sonata for Violin and Piano; Pia Liptak: Four Haiku; David Liptak: Sonata for Violin and Piano; Baljinder Sekhon: Three Little Lights

Classical Music

This electrifying performance gives vivid testimony to the multifaceted partnership of James Gaffigan and the Lucerne Symphony Orchestra and invites us to explore the conductor's American roots. The program features Leonard Bernstein's mischievous dances from West Side Story, Charles Ives's spiritual Symphony No.3, the dramatically potent dissonance of Ruth Crawford's Andante for strings and Samuel Barber's boldly athletic Toccata for organ and orchestra.

Charles Ives wrote almost two hundred songs. Although his reputation rests on orchestral, chamber and piano music, it is Ives's songs that represent the heart of his creative thinking. The expressive variety encountered is accordingly vast: indeed, the gradual evolution of Ives's songwriting is analogous to the wider evolution of American music during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This new edition includes all the songs that Ives completed. The alphabetic approach ensures that each volume (of which this disc is the fourth of six) contains a representative cross-section.

This album showcases a selection of Ives’ shorter works for orchestra. Experiments, marches, arrangements, and enticingly incomplete fragments are included alongside the Four Ragtime Dances and Chromâtimelôdtune, one of Ives’ most startling creations. Ives specialist James Sinclair conducts. Includes seven world premiere recordings. Released to mark the 150th anniversary of Ives’s birth.

Piano Sonata No. 2

On the 150th anniversary of the birth of Charles Ives - acclaimed by his champion Leonard Bernstein as the "first great American composer", who, "all alone in his Connecticut barn, created his own private musical revolution" - Sony Classical presents the most authoritative recording collection ever released of works by this eccentric, prophetic genius.

The 5-CD box set Charles Ives - The Anniversary Edition is a unique and provocative introduction only released previously 50 years ago on LP by Columbia Masterworks under the art direction of Henrietta Condak to celebrate Ives's centenary.

The first disc examines "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 towering achievements, 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 Largo cantabile Hymn is performed by the New York String Quartet and double bass player Alvin Brehm. CD 2, "The Celestial Country", offers Ives's early cantata by that name, composed in 1897-99 for his conservative Yale composition teacher Horatio Parker. It is sung 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 and Leopold Stokowski conducting. "The Things Our Fathers Loved", CD 3, contains 25 of Ives's songs, delivered by the soprano Helen Boatwright, who specialized in American song. She is partnered by John Kirkpatrick, who studied and worked closely with Ives and is still regarded as the most authoritative interpreter of his piano music. Gramophone in 1974 praised this famous recording as "the finest selection ever to appear" on LP of "what may well turn out to be considered his most important, characteristic and consistently inspired body of music."

Classical Music

Classical Music

The Concord Sonata by Charles Ives is without doubt the most iconic American piano sonata. Its epic length (appr. 50 minutes), its extreme technical difficulties and its highly unusual form and writing make it one of the greatest challenges for any performing pianist. Any new recording of it is an event. The sonata’s 4 movements represent figures associated with the Transcendentalism movement: Ralph Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Bronson and Louisa Alcott and Henry David Thoreau. The piece demonstrates Ives' experimental tendencies: much of it is written without barlines, the harmonies are advanced, and in the second movement there is a cluster chord created by depressing the piano's keys with a piece of wood. The piece also amply demonstrates Ives' fondness for musical quotation (especially Beethoven’s 5th). Pianist Thomas Hell is widely recognised as a specialist of 20th century piano repertoire. He recorded works by Carter, Schoenberg, Dallapiccola, Boulez and the complete Etudes by Ligeti. “A clear frontrunner.” - Classicstoday.com

Charles Ives’ Concord Sonata, the work to which this album is devoted, is as diversified and idiosyncratic as the composer himself. The piece has four movements, each based on an American writer of the 19th century. All writers which inspired Ives had a close relationship with Concord, Massachusetts. Pianist Tzimon Barto provides a brilliant interpretation full of sensitivity and impressive virtuosity to this work.

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

This production received the quarterly German Record Critics' Award! Herbert Henck: piano.

In addition to his two piano sonatas, the most extensive compositions among his works, Ives wrote a series of shorter piano pieces of which those that have been published are collected on this recording. United in such a manner, they present a kind of cross-section of Ives' compositional output setting in relief at the same time several characteristics of his music. Marches, chorales, ragtimes, waltzes, popular American songs, classical quotations, sounds that recede and sounds that approach from the distance, thickly woven contrapuntal movements, seriousness, wit and high spirits, melancholy, pathos and irony, they all find themselves in an often colourful, inimitable mixture, often in the same piece, often in provoking juxtaposition. Cross-connections between the individual pieces as well as between them and others of his works are portraits, as obvious as they are characteristic, of a compositional technique that as strongly resisted the exclusion of any kind of musical materials as it was effortlessly able to integrate them. Such an approach to traditional styles and subjects, formal construction, playing techniques, form types, tuning systems, or conventions of performance, incorporating these materials to the point of disintegration, sometimes in abrupt confrontation, gives his music character and stature, and identifies Ives as one of the truly experimental composers of our century whose ideas have since been carried on in an even broader and more radical sense by John Cage. This production received the quarterly German Record Critics' Award.

Classical Music

Ives was and remains a great musical pioneer, and as such open to misunderstanding, but the first two of his symphonies hold onto conventional sonorities from the rich European legacy of the past. … These are both works with their origins in Ives’s student years, the First Symphony taking clear cues from great predecessors such as Dvo?ák, and with the flavour of Brahms and others. If you know your Nielsen symphonies you could almost swear that little descending A F# E theme in the Second Symphony might have leaked across to Denmark, and though this is as good as impossible it may give some idea of the character to be found here.

As I hear it, Sir Andrew Davis’s interpretations take that authentic approach, removing the wilder later works from the picture and approaching these scores as serious attempts to create grand personal statements based on the musical influences to hand at the turn of the century and, in the case of the First Symphony, being tamed by the conventions held as gospel by Ives’s teacher Horatio Parker. Parker both restrained the harmonic excesses of his student while at the same time introducing him to the greats of the Germanic tradition. Davis is sensitive to this, and you can hear Brahms in the shaping of the string notes of the melodic lines in the Second Symphony in particular. Ives’s grafting of American tunes onto his Romantic symphonic model has little effect in releasing the work from its historic constraints. Ives wasn’t writing for laughs, and ‘hamming-up’ the naïve strangeness and unusual confluence in either of these symphonies doesn’t help their cause. A side-effect of seeking refinement is indeed a loss of boisterous energy, but is that what Ives would have been after at this point?

Unencumbered by controversy and artificially introduced passions but filled with atmospheric expression and full of clarity in their adherence to the letter of these scores, I really quite like these performances, and look forward to what Sir Andrew Davis does with the later symphonies. That twinkle in his eye tells me this series might be starting out as something of a sleeper and, as with Ives himself, the best is yet to come.

– Dominy Clements, MusicWeb International

Concord, Massachusetts is an American city that in the nineteenth century was a haven for thinkers and activists who focused on the trend of transcendentalism representing values such as equality, independence and self-reliance. The ideas of transcendentalists was inherent in Charles Ives works. His 4-part Piano Sonata II Concord, Mass. 1840-1860 is devoted to "four wise people" associated with Concord - important representatives of this trend. During Ives's life the Sonata was considered almost impossible to perform, and as a result was rarely recorded. It was eventually recorded in Poland for the first time. This task was undertaken by pianist Daniel Brylewski, laureate of international contests for contemporary music, specializing in the 20th and 21st century repertoire. The present release presents that recording.