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...

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