Ives: Orchestral Works, Vol. 3

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With this release, Sir Andrew Davis and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra round out their Ives cycle in superb form. Recordings of Ives, unlike Gershwin, by groups outside of the U.S. may still be comparatively rare, but Davis has nailed the essential diverse, dense networks of Ives' language, assisted by new performing editions and by excellent Chandos engineering in two different Melbourne venues, thereby keeping the multiple strands of the music clear. Sample the first movement of the Symphony No. 3 ("The Camp Meeting"), where Davis gives some lyricism to the chains of thirds that make up much of the material, and correctly sees them as a quiet pastoral foil to the more public marches and hymn tunes that come later. The Symphony No. 4 has a visionary sweep here that it attains in few other recordings, and part of the reason is the dreamy tones coaxed from the Melbourne Symphony Chorus by chorus master Anthony Pasquill. You get a star (or near-star) pianist in the Fourth Symphony here, Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, which is unusual. But Davis has the music under enough control to bring the piano unusually far forward in the music, and to open up a whole new set of internal relationships in the work. The Orchestral Set No. 2, with its depiction of a crowd in New York hearing the news of the sinking of the Lusitania, is also haunting and seems to acquire new relevance. This is an absolutely top-notch Ives recording.

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