Ives: String Quartets Nos. 1 & 2 (CD review)

Juilliard String Quartet. Newton Classics 8802197.

Don’t you just love the music of American composer Charles Ives (1874-1954)?  It’s always so quirky, and the older the guy got, the more eccentric his music became. The present album combines two of his more-popular works, the early String Quartet No. 1, which is rather conventional for the man, and the later String Quartet No. 2, which dates from over a dozen years on and shows how unique (and curious) his music had become. The two works make a fascinating study in comparisons and contrasts, and you couldn’t ask for better performances or sound than these 1967 re-released recordings from the world-famous Juilliard String Quartet.

I don’t need to remind you that the Juilliard String Quartet is among the oldest continuing string quartets in the world. Founded in 1946 at the Juilliard School in New York, the group has won numerous awards over the years, including four Grammys, and recorded countless discs. Of course, all of the original musicians are gone now, but at the time of this recording, it still involved several founding members. The main thing is that they play impeccably, and no one has matched their performances of these Ives String Quartets. As constituted here, the group included Robert Mann and Earl Carlyss, violins; Raphael Hillyer, viola; and Claus Adam, cello.

Ives wrote his String Quartet No. 1 (subtitled “From the Salvation Army”) somewhere between 1897-1900, just after he’d finished Yale. However, like many of his compositions, it never saw a public performance in his lifetime. The fellow was definitely ahead of his time in the field of modern music, and because his stuff was even more far-out than most modernists of his day, he didn’t have a lot of followers at the time. The First Quartet didn’t see a public performance until 1957, several years after his death, even though it is one of his more-traditional pieces of music.

Ives grew up loving band music, and one can hear its influence in almost all his music including the First Quartet. Further defined as "A Revival Service," the First Quartet abounds in faintly recognizable melodies, in this case hymns, as was Ives's wont. In all of the composer's work we hear familiar tunes that are just barely out of reach. Ives divides the "Service" into an introductory Chorale, a Prelude, an Offertory, and a Postlude, corresponding to a traditional four-movement quartet arrangement. The first section is a meditation, the second a zippy scherzo with lilting dance numbers, the third a beautiful slow movement, and the forth an Allegro finale.

The Juilliard Quartet play the piece with energy, dexterity, grace, variety; you name it, they do it.  There doesn't appear to be anything they can't handle with virtuosic ease. Given that the First Quartet is fairly straightforward (comparatively, for Ives), that doesn't mean that the Juilliard players perform it in any perfunctory manner. Instead, they invest it with all the spirit they can muster, making the music glisten with vigor. It's possible that no one may equal their rendition of the work.

Then, there's the Second String Quartet, and we're suddenly listening to something more reminiscent of Ives, the composer with the weird, atonal harmonies and sudden dissonances. What a difference a decade makes. The Second Quartet dates from around 1913-15 and shows how far Ives had moved along in his unique musical style. It’s filled with far more disharmony, discords, tonal disparities, argument shifts, complex rhythms, and transcendent conflicts than the First Quartet, and, therefore, makes for more-challenging listening.

Ives said he wrote the Second Quartet as a counterpoint to the "trite" character and style of typical concert quartets. I’m not sure if he was also referring to his own First Quartet. In any case, the Juilliard players manage to make it a lot less harsh than I've sometimes heard it played. What's more, the oddball interjection of familiar songs isn't nearly so jarring as it can sometimes sound. Ives also said he intended the work's three movements to represent four men "who converse, discuss, argue, fight, shake hands, shut up--then walk up the mountain side to view the firmament." Fair enough; people can be pretty strange when they're in the midst of tensions and disagreement. And it's these contrasts that we hear the Juilliard players bring out most clearly in the music. It's not quite program music in the sense of a Mussorgsky or Strauss tone poem, but Ives clearly wanted to convey specific impressions, which the Juilliard performers are happy to exploit and still make it sound like music and not noise. The conflicts may get raucous, but the interpretation remains likable, maybe because the Juilliard players appear to like the music so much. Although the Second Quartet is not something you might want to listen to very often, this is the version to which you'll want to return as the mood strikes you.

Columbia Records (CBS) originally recorded the music at the Columbia 30th Street Studio, New York City in 1966-67, releasing the record in 1967. Newton Classics re-released them on the current disc in 2013. The sound is quite good, very transparent, with each of the four players distinctly placed across the room. Detailing is more than up to the job, and the frequency response appears nicely extended. The sound is big and bold, well spread out but not entirely across the room--just fairly close up for maximum clarity. OK, maybe the stereo spread is a tad too wide for so small an ensemble, yet the disc sounds better than most anything being made today: beautifully realistic, immaculately clean, with remarkable separation and air. There is no harshness here, no brightness, no forwardness; it's all as smoothly and naturally recorded as you could want, putting real players and real music in your living room.

To listen to a brief excerpt from this album, click here:

JJP

Meet the Staff

Meet the Staff
John J. Puccio, Founder and Contributor

Understand, I'm just an everyday guy reacting to something I love. And I've been doing it for a very long time, my appreciation for classical music starting with the musical excerpts on the Big Jon and Sparkie radio show in the early Fifties and the purchase of my first recording, The 101 Strings Play the Classics, around 1956. In the late Sixties I began teaching high school English and Film Studies as well as becoming interested in hi-fi, my audio ambitions graduating me from a pair of AR-3 speakers to the Fulton J's recommended by The Stereophile's J. Gordon Holt. In the early Seventies, I began writing for a number of audio magazines, including Audio Excellence, Audio Forum, The Boston Audio Society Speaker, The American Record Guide, and from 1976 until 2008, The $ensible Sound, for which I served as Classical Music Editor.

Today, I'm retired from teaching and use a pair of bi-amped VMPS RM40s loudspeakers for my listening. In addition to writing for the Classical Candor blog, I served as the Movie Review Editor for the Web site Movie Metropolis (formerly DVDTown) from 1997-2013. Music and movies. Life couldn't be better.

Karl Nehring, Editor and Contributor

For more than 20 years I was the editor of The $ensible Sound magazine and a regular contributor to both its equipment and recordings review pages. I would not presume to present myself as some sort of expert on music, but I have a deep love for and appreciation of many types of music, "classical" especially, and have listened to thousands of recordings over the years, many of which still line the walls of my listening room (and occasionally spill onto the furniture and floor, much to the chagrin of my long-suffering wife). I have always taken the approach as a reviewer that what I am trying to do is simply to point out to readers that I have come across a recording that I have found of interest, a recording that I think they might appreciate my having pointed out to them. I suppose that sounds a bit simple-minded, but I know I appreciate reading reviews by others that do the same for me — point out recordings that they think I might enjoy.

For readers who might be wondering about what kind of system I am using to do my listening, I should probably point out that I do a LOT of music listening and employ a variety of means to do so in a variety of environments, as I would imagine many music lovers also do. Starting at the more grandiose end of the scale, the system in which I do my most serious listening comprises Marantz CD 6007 and Onkyo CD 7030 CD players, NAD C 658 streaming preamp/DAC, Legacy Audio PowerBloc2 amplifier, and a pair of Legacy Audio Focus SE loudspeakers. I occasionally do some listening through pair of Sennheiser 560S headphones. I miss the excellent ELS Studio sound system in our 2016 Acura RDX (now my wife's daily driver) on which I had ripped more than a hundred favorite CDs to the hard drive, so now when driving my 2022 Accord EX-L Hybrid I stream music from my phone through its adequate but not outstanding factory system. For more casual listening at home when I am not in my listening room, I often stream music through the phone into a Vizio soundbar system that has tolerably nice sound for such a diminutive physical presence. And finally, at the least grandiose end of the scale, I have an Ultimate Ears Wonderboom II Bluetooth speaker for those occasions where I am somewhere by myself without a sound system but in desperate need of a musical fix. I just can’t imagine life without music and I am humbly grateful for the technology that enables us to enjoy it in so many wonderful ways.

William (Bill) Heck, Webmaster and Contributor

Among my early childhood memories are those of listening to my mother playing records (some even 78 rpm ones!) of both classical music and jazz tunes. I suppose that her love of music was transmitted genetically, and my interest was sustained by years of playing in rock bands – until I realized that this was no way to make a living. The interest in classical music was rekindled in grad school when the university FM station serving as background music for studying happened to play the Brahms First Symphony. As the work came to an end, it struck me forcibly that this was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard, and from that point on, I never looked back. This revelation was to the detriment of my studies, as I subsequently spent way too much time simply listening, but music has remained a significant part of my life. These days, although I still can tell a trumpet from a bassoon and a quarter note from a treble clef, I have to admit that I remain a nonexpert. But I do love music in general and classical music in particular, and I enjoy sharing both information and opinions about it.

The audiophile bug bit about the same time that I returned to classical music. I’ve gone through plenty of equipment, brands from Audio Research to Yamaha, and the best of it has opened new audio insights. Along the way, I reviewed components, and occasionally recordings, for The $ensible Sound magazine. Most recently I’ve moved to my “ultimate system” consisting of a BlueSound Node streamer, an ancient Toshiba multi-format disk player serving as a CD transport, Legacy Wavelet II DAC/preamp/crossover, dual Legacy PowerBloc2 amps, and Legacy Signature SE speakers (biamped), all connected with decently made, no-frills cables. With the arrival of CD and higher resolution streaming, that is now the source for most of my listening.

Ryan Ross, Contributor

I started listening to and studying classical music in earnest nearly three decades ago. This interest grew naturally out of my training as a pianist. I am now a musicologist by profession, specializing in British and other symphonic music of the 19th and 20th centuries. My scholarly work has been published in major music journals, as well as in other outlets. Current research focuses include twentieth-century symphonic historiography, and the music of Jean Sibelius, Ralph Vaughan Williams, and Malcolm Arnold.

I am honored to contribute writings to Classical Candor. In an age where the classical recording industry is being subjected to such profound pressures and changes, it is more important than ever for those of us steeped in this cultural tradition to continue to foster its love and exposure. I hope that my readers can find value, no matter how modest, in what I offer here.


Bryan Geyer, Technical Analyst

I initially embraced classical music in 1954 when I mistuned my car radio and heard the Heifetz recording of Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto. That inspired me to board the new "hi-fi" DIY bandwagon. In 1957 I joined one of the pioneer semiconductor makers and spent the next 32 years marketing transistors and microcircuits to military contractors. Home audio DIY projects remained a personal passion until 1989 when we created our own new photography equipment company. I later (2012) revived my interest in two channel audio when we "downsized" our life and determined that mini-monitors + paired subwoofers were a great way to mate fine music with the space constraints of condo living.

Visitors that view my technical papers on this site may wonder why they appear here, rather than on a site that features audio equipment reviews. My reason is that I tried the latter, and prefer to publish for people who actually want to listen to music; not to equipment. My focus is in describing what's technically beneficial to assure that the sound of the system will accurately replicate the source input signal (i. e. exhibit high accuracy) without inordinate cost and complexity. Conversely, most of the audiophiles of today strive to achieve sound that's euphonic, i.e. be personally satisfying. In essence, audiophiles seek sound that's consistent with their desire; the music is simply a test signal.

Mission Statement

It is the goal of Classical Candor to promote the enjoyment of classical music. Other forms of music come and go--minuets, waltzes, ragtime, blues, jazz, bebop, country-western, rock-'n'-roll, heavy metal, rap, and the rest--but classical music has been around for hundreds of years and will continue to be around for hundreds more. It's no accident that every major city in the world has one or more symphony orchestras.

When I was young, I heard it said that only intellectuals could appreciate classical music, that it required dedicated concentration to appreciate. Nonsense. I'm no intellectual, and I've always loved classical music. Anyone who's ever seen and enjoyed Disney's Fantasia or a Looney Tunes cartoon playing Rossini's William Tell Overture or Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 can attest to the power and joy of classical music, and that's just about everybody.

So, if Classical Candor can expand one's awareness of classical music and bring more joy to one's life, more power to it. It's done its job. --John J. Puccio

Contact Information

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"Their Master's Voice" by Michael Sowa

"Their Master's Voice" by Michael Sowa