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Composer: Ives, Charles

Dvorak's Prophecy - A New Narrative for American Classical Music: Film 2: Charles Ives' America

Mayer, Steven

Sharp, William

Sanchez, Paul T.

Conductor: Schermerhorn, Kenneth

Conductor: Sinclair, James

Television Director: Horowitz, Joseph

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Baritone: Sharp, William

Piano: Mayer, Steven

Piano: Sanchez, Paul T.

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Year of Production: 2021

Playing Time: 01:31:20

Catalogue Number: 2.110701

UPC: 747313570157

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Steeped in nostalgia, in his Danbury childhood and the New England Transcendentalists with whom he profoundly identified, in the American experience of race which he absorbed from his Abolitionist grandparents, Ives used the past with consummate empathy and brave artistry. A musical Whitman or Melville, he embodies the American trope of the 'self-made genius', heeding Emerson's call to cut the cultural umbilical cord with Europe, forging an original path. The music at hand here includes his Second Symphony (a milestones in culling the vernacular to set beside Huckleberry Finn), The Housatonic at Stockridge (possibly the most sublime nature reverie in the American orchestral repertoire), and The St Gaudens in Boston Common (a singular ghost dirge in tribute to Colonel Robert Gould Shaw's Black Civil War regiment). Also heard portions of Ive's Concord Sonata performed by Steven Mayer (an interpretation seasoned by a lifetime of advocacy) and half a dozen Ives songs peerlessly sung (in live performance with Paul Sanchez) by William Sharp. The commentators include the Ives scholars J. Peter Burkholder and Judith Tick, and the conductor James Sinclair