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ClassicsOnline Home » IVES: Orchestral Sets Nos. 1-3 (Sinclair) > Review List
The works on this recording focus on a singular genre created by a singular composer. The kind of piece Charles Ives called a ‘set’ is usually a larger work made by putting together independently-written smaller pieces. The First Orchestral Set, variously titled Three Places in New England and A New England Symphony, is one of Ives’s great tributes to his roots. Put together around 1913-14 from material going back years, it is typically Ivesian in that each movement has an underlying program. Like the other sets, the Second has a slow-fast-slow pattern and a visionary hymn-based finale. The unfinished Third Orchestral Set was the only set Ives planned as a whole from the beginning. It may stand as the most profound discovery of the many and ongoing efforts to reconstruct Ives’s incomplete works. This is its first complete performance and recording.
Naxos continues its fine American Classics series with this solid new release that groups together Charles Ives’ Three Orchestral Sets, the third of which is appearing on record for the first time after some generally decent reconstructive editorial work on its behalf by David Gray Porter and Nors Josephson. James Sinclair conducts with his usual flair for Ives’ textural and formal conflicts. If the performance can be said to veer at times towards a slightly too precious intimation of the composer’s sublime leanings in the slow sections, it is nevertheless also true that the internal logic of collage that is fundamentally proposed by the music (encapsulated in the very idea of the set as genre) is happily upheld and enjoyed by conductor and band elsewhere.