IVES Songs Volume 1: “123” through “Cradle Song” Naxos 8.559269
IVES Songs Volume 2: “December” through “Gruss” Naxos 8.559270
IVES Songs Volume 3: “Harpalus” through “Luck and Work” Naxos 8.559271
IVES Songs Volume 4: “Majority” through “Over the Treetops” Naxos 8.559272
IVES Songs Volume 5: “Paracelsus” through “Swimmers” Naxos 8.559273
IVES Songs Volume 6: “Tarrant Moss” through “Yellow Leaves”. Naxos 8.559274

Charles Ives completed nearly 200 songs between 1887 and 1926, spanning the entirety of his composing life. All of his aesthetic, musical, poetic, philosophical, and political concerns are addressed, one way or another, in one style or another. All of the completed songs are included in Naxos’ six volumes, which are organized according to song titles, in alphabetical order. This arrangement seems extremely counter-intuitive, but it turns out to be really inspired, as it allows a listener to get a picture of the range of Ives’ work in the form, without having to purchase the entire set.

Like every collection of this size and this variety, every listener will have favorites and every listener will find revelations. Many of the songs are well-known, such as “General William Booth Enters Into Heaven” (Volume 2, David Pittsinger, bass, and Douglas Dickson, piano), “Majority” (Volume 4, Robert Gardner, baritone, and Eric Trudel, piano), “The Cage” (Volume 1, Gardner and J. J. Penna, piano) and “The Greatest Man” (Michael Cavalieri, baritone, and Dickson).

An example of a revelation is “Ich Grolle Nicht” (Volume 3, Gardner and Penna). This is an early (1898) song on a text by Heinrich Heine. This song and others from the same time frame show a fully mature composer with a solid grasp on the late Romantic style of the day. The touching lyricism that characterizes this song emerges throughout Ives’ career, as in the deconstruction of the hymn “At the River” (Volume 1, Sara Jakubiak, soprano, and Dickson).

Ives’ stentorian mode comes into play in such political/patriotic songs as “Lincoln, the Great Commoner” (Volume 3, Gardner and Trudel) and “Walt Whitman” (Volume 6, Ryan MacPherson, tenor, and Trudel), which are also portraits of their subjects in the manner of the composer’s “Concord” Sonata. Patriotic fervor also brings out Ives more....

Review By Paul Turok,Turok’s Choice,March 2009

Charles Ives’s complete songs, arranged alphabetically by title from No.1 (“1,2,3”) to No.193 (“Yellow Leaves”) are performed by 18 fine singers, excellent pianists, and other instrumentalists as required (8.559269–8.559274, six discs). Ives, perhaps America’s greatest musical visionary, did not have the compositional technique to fulfill his quixotic ideas. Because his songs are short, formal problems don’t arise that plague his larger pieces; textual consistency also tends to unify his materials, so that his songs don’t sound as arbitrary as some of the larger pieces do. He set great Europeans like Milton and Heine rather awkwardly. Greater inspiration seems to have come from the American writers of his time, like Whitman or Whittier, whose works were set eccentrically, but with a particular American flavor. Many of his songs were arranged from instrumental pieces: Thoreau (Vol.6) is from the Second Piano Sonata, the haunting finale of “Three Places in New England” shows up as The Housatonic at Stockbridge (Vol.3). Several come from his violin sonatas: Watchman (Vol.6), At the River (Vol.1), His Exaltation (Vol.3) and The Camp-Meeting (Vol.1) is from a movement of his Third Symphony. TC favorites are The Circus Band (Vol.1), The New River (Vol.4) and Charlie Rutlage (Vol.1) among others. This is a project of the greatest importance, musically and as documentation, that is not likely to be available otherwise. Collectors will want to sample several of these discs; libraries will want them all.