Ives: Complete Work For Violin And Piano

Album review

Nobu Wakabayashi is an interesting choice as an interpreter of Ives' violin music; rather than a new music-styled musician, Wakabayashi is skilled in the Romantic manner, a 1986 winner of the Wieniawski Competition renowned for her playing of Brahms. However, as a "complete" survey of Ives' output for violin and piano, Arte Nova's two-CD package Charles Ives: Complete Works for Violin and Piano is more ambitious toward that end than an actual realization of it. Charles Ives: Complete Works for Violin and Piano consists of the four canonical violin sonatas and an incomplete Pre-First Sonata and does not venture into Decoration Day or other one-off pieces that Ives also wrote for this combination, later organized in other ways.
The performance of the Pre-First here is fraught with difficulties. It is not complete; this is just a two-movement version edited by Eugene Gratovich; the full-length Pre-First is in at least three movements, possibly four. Wise's piano mostly drowns out Wakabayashi's violin in the first movement -- a pity -- and the second-movement Largo is taken at a fast Andante, robbing the movement of its limpid, drooping harmonic motion. Wakabayashi sounds nice in slow solo passages where she can imbue the violin part with some of the warm Romantic tone for which she is noted; however, for most of the album she is just under the surface and sounds thin. Additionally, it seems hard for Wise not to drive the program -- tempi are taken a bit too fast in many movements, although "In the Barn" from the Sonata No. 2 is one movement that is taken a little too slowly.
The recording, made at the Funkhaus at WDR Cologne, is very dry and favors the piano -- parts of it almost sound like a piano sonata with violin accompaniment. Overall, Charles Ives: Complete Works for Violin and Piano is not bad, but it is not a bargain; even though this might get some idea of Ives' violin music into your ears, you will want better. The front cover features a sloppy, miserable painting of Ives that could have been the work of a second-grade art student

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