New England Holidays gets less play than Ives’s four numbered symphonies, but I love it nevertheless, particularly “Decoration Day,” which portrays the march to the cemetery to lay wreaths and flowers on the graves of the Civil War dead to the accompaniment of “Adestes Fideles,” “The Battle Cry of Freedom,” “Tenting on the Old Camp Ground,” and “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” among other tunes. I find this one of Ives’s most beautiful works. It begins in solemn contemplation. Then comes the first march or potpourri of march tunes. The trumpeter blows “Taps” as wisps of “Nearer, My God, to Thee” float about in the strings. Then there’s a raucous quick march back to town. The movement ends in quiet reflection, over in an instant. The piece sort of crumbles in a soft poof! Why that ending? I suspect it’s because the Civil War was still a living memory for many of the celebrants, like us watching a D-Day or a Viet Nam commemoration. People lost family and friends.

Many of Ives’s tone poems are quite pictorial in their procedures, and the other movements follow the same general method. “The Fourth of July” Ives called “a boy’s Fourth”—that is, a day when boys had license to light fireworks and, to some extent, cut loose. Again, we have a slow introduction, but it’s more like the stirrings around daylight. A tuba begins with a fragment of “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean” (one of the hits on the Ivesian jukebox) taken at a glacial pace, and other instruments join in with fragments of their own, building excitement. We get the odd firecracker going off at the wrong time. Eventually, marching bands parade past with, again, “Battle Cry of Freedom,” “Battle Hymn of the Republic,“ a full-blown ”Columbia, the Gem,” ”Reveille.,” and a fife and drum corps practicing, all in the music. The section climaxes on “Columbia, the Gem,” and moves on to a fireworks display. The piece ends in a quiet rain of ash.

“Thanksgiving and Forefather’s Day” has a more serious intent and aims, I think, to transport the listener from the immediate occasion to transcendental musings. It runs significantly longer than any of the other movements. Once more, we begin witmore....

Stravinsky, once asked to define a musical masterpiece, instantly volunteered Ives’s “Decoration Day”. The second movement of the Holidays Symphony is indeed among the American iconoclast’s best and most characteristic works, and here receives a compelling, atmospheric performance, with Sinclair getting the requisite sense of mystery and stoic sadness at the heart of the dark introduction. The central “Second Regiment Connecticut National Guard March” is aptly boisterous with a notably uninhibited bass drum, and the benedictory finale has an almost unearthly haunting quality here, Sinclair drawing exceptionally concentrated playing from the Swedish orchestra.

The program begins with the symphony’s second movement, “Decoration Day” (now known as Memorial Day). This is an Ives’ masterpiece with all those stylistic quirks that for many of us make him the greatest American composer to yet come down the pike. It opens with a lovely laid-back impressionistic representation of morning, but hints of old familiar hymn tunes as well as “Taps” begin to emerge. Then a joyous full-fledged march breaks out, only to fade away as the movement ends reverently in memory of the fallen.

Ives scholar David G. Porter, who you may remember did a remarkable reconstruction of Charlie’s Emerson Piano Concerto (1911), is represented here by his performing realizations of The General Slocum (1904) and Overture in G Minor (1899). These world première recordings are not to be missed.

The former work is named for a side-wheeler steamboat that caught fire in 1904, killing over a thousand people. Composed that same year to honor those who died, it opens quietly. Then with a blast from the ship’s whistle one can picture revolving paddle wheels and a boatload of carefree passengers, singing such popular songs as “Daisy Daisy, Give Me Your Answer Do,” on an excursion around New York City. Suddenly with a drum roll and dissonant fiery forte passages, joy turns to panic as the ship bursts into flames. These quickly abate, and we’re left with a pianissimo smoke bank drifting over the waters with hints of “Nearer, My God to Thee” (Bethany version). In the space of six minutes Ives says what would take many composers sixty!

The overture was written while Ives was a student at Yale College (1894–1898), and just as in his first two symphonies (1896–1901, see the newsletters of 6 and 20 December 2006), you’ll find echoes of Brahms (1833–1897), Dvorák (1841–1904), Tchaikovsky (1840–1893), and Wagner (1813–1883). There are also occasional chromatic excursions, which must have shocked his conservative, German-trained professor, Horatio Parker (see the newsletters of 18 April 2006). Oddly enough one of the themes [track-3, beginning at 02:02] has a rhythmic signature that somewhat anticipates the opening of Shostakovich’s (1906–1975) first symphony (1923–24).

The third movement of New England Holidays entitled “The Fourth of July” follows. It’s another American masterpiece presented here in a stunning realization by Wayne Shirley, whom some will remember fondly as the imore....

The title says ‘best of,’ but this is more like favorite music of the year, recordings that sound great and excite and please first and last. No matter the analysis or exploration of meaning, this is my list of music that I went back to again and again, just to listen to and enjoy in 2009:

It was a good year for René Jacobs, with a notable recording of Idomeneo. What I love more, though, is his new release of Haydn’s The Creation. His partnership with the Freiburger Barockorchester is one of the most exciting things in classical music today. The sound they have developed together seems the point and culmination of decades of exploring the idea of how baroque and classical music was heard when it was brand new; the sinewy, tart ensemble seems a direct expression of both conductor and the music they perform. This set grabs the attention with the best imaginable conveyance of Haydn’s representation of order forming out of chaos; every other recording I have heard presents the music as a structure coming together out of smaller fragments, and to that Jacobs adds the very idea of sound cohering out of chaos. I’ve heard no other music like this, of any kind. As usual he adds a group of stellar singers, Julia Kleiter, Maximilian Schmitt and Johannes Weisser. A fantastic recording. Here’s a sample:

Naxos puts out a vast amount of high quality music, and even at the budget price still produces recordings that are as good as they come. The company would be welcome if all they were doing was recording the standard classical repertoire, but they are important because their ambitions are greater than that. Two of their current projects are the recording of the music of Anton von Webern under the eminent conductor Robert Craft, and their tremendous American Classics series, which seeks to present, in the broadest sense, the classical music history of this country—past, present and future—and is so far succeeding beyond expectations. The second volume of Webern’s music was released this year, and features Craft leading the composer’s crystalline orchestration of Bach’s Ricercata, the Op. 5 Five Movements for String Orchestra and the great Five Pieces for Orchestra (Op. 10) and Variationsmore....

The three movements of New England Holidays Symphony show Ives at his exuberant best: chaotically jubilant sketches of carnivalesque joy and abandon. Stravinsky hailed ‘Decoration Day’ as the definitive musical masterpiece: based on Decoration Day ceremonies experienced in his youth, Ives transforms memories of his father’s marching band playing dirges into a riotous dream-like narrative, recognisable tunes clashing with the crazed noise of the crowd. ‘The General Slocum’ comes under Ives’s ‘Cartoons and Take Offs’ genre, or ‘literal’ depictions of events, in this case the explosion of the titular ship in which over 1000 people were killed. Here we’re in almost hauntological territory, as melodies from popular ditties of the time wash against the ominous throb of the waves, recalling The Caretaker and Gavin Bryars’s ‘Sinking of the Titanic’, before disaster strikes in the form of teeth-gnashing dissonance. The other descriptive piece, ‘Yale-Princeton Football Game’, opts for light-hearted jollity, portraying the activities both on and off the pitch of the famous 1897 match through wild piano improvisations, whistles and camp woodwind bleets. The performances are incredibly vibrant, the recording lush, and the cover art, a reproduction of a painting by Ives’s grandnephew James Bigalow Hall, captures the beautiful madness of Ives’s music perfectly.