Ives: Variations on 'America' (CD review)

Also, Old Home Days; The Alcotts. Colonel Timothy W. Foley, United States Marine Band. Naxos 8.570559.

With the big exceptions of "The Unanswered Question" and "Central Park in the Dark," some of the music by Charles Ives (1874-1954) can be more than a bit clamorous and dissonant, turning off a few listeners. But it seems to me that it would be hard for anyone not to like this collection of Ives's early band music, superbly rendered in modern concert-band arrangements by "The President's Own" United States Marine Band.

The booklet note tells us that Ives grew up like his elder contemporary, John Philip Sousa, enjoying and later composing band music, and the works of Ives on this disc, from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, show us the influence it had on the young man.

Most of the pieces, which range from marches ("Country Band March") to waltzes ("Waltz") to fictitious college anthems ("Omega Lambda chi") to legitimate college tunes ("A Son of a Gambolier") to miniature tone poems ("Runaway Horse on Main Street") to full-blown suites ("Old Home Days"), are absolutely charming, touching, and moving by turns, only occasionally erupting into the cacophonous discord we sometimes associate with the composer. Of course, whereas Sousa remained devoted to band music all his life and seldom strayed too far from the martial style, Ives soon developed a taste for wider interests, as his symphonies, songs, and chamber music attest.  Still, Ives remained, as did Sousa, dedicated to pure Americana, and one can hear in this band music the many nationalistic themes to come.

The audio, which Naxos recorded in 2003, is pleasantly smooth for a band recording, with plenty of depth and bloom, though not a lot of air around the instruments. The miking sounds moderately distanced, yet the sonics still carry a nice impact, and, most of all, everything is highly listenable.

Adapted from a review the author originally published in the $ensible Sound magazine.

JJP