CHARLES IVES : Robert Browning Overture • Symphony No. 2 (Kenneth Schermerhorn) (2000) FLAC (image+.cue), lossless

Ives's Second Symphony (assembled from some earlier church preludes and secular overtures around 1900-02, with its symphonic substance and orchestrations 1907-10 and final touches through 1950) is undoubtedly the most 'American' of symphonies. Drawing on patriotic marches, Stephen Foster tunes, gospel hymns, and a college song for most of its thematic material, it anticipates by three decades the homespun-flavored works of Virgil Thomson, Roy Harris, and Copland. The Symphony opens with a flowing fugato that within seven measures introduces Foster's Massa's in de Cold Ground. A second quote from the fiddle tune Pig Town Fling lightens the mood. The remainder of this introductory movement combines these elements with the main motif from Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean. A gentle oboe recitative segues into Henry Clay Work's jubilant song Wake Nicodemus, the main thematic material of the second movement. Shifting freely from key to key, Ives fragments Work's song to use as symphonic development. The minor-key version of Bringing in the Sheaves is set in relief against Work's melody. A sweetly harmonized quote of the college hazing song Where O Where Are the Verdant Freshmen? - sounding a lot like the song Dixie - provides contrast The coda, a dizzying collage of tunes - Where O Where, Wake Nicodemus, and the hymn

Hamburg - brings the movement to its breathless conclusion. The third movement, Adagio cantabile, first saw light of day as the slow movement to Ives's First

Symphony but was withdrawn at Parker's request. Beginning solemnly, quotes from Beulah Land and Materna (now known as ‘America the Beautiful’) are joined to extend the theme. This is followed by an Andante episode based on the hymns Missionary Chant and Nettleton. A final statement of the Beulah/Materna group and a quiet horn call bring the movement to a close. Following the model of Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony, Ives introduces a cyclic return of his first movement to serve as his fourth movement - really an extended introduction to the finale. Beginning this with a lively passage reminiscent of folk fiddling, the Stephen Foster song Camptown Races is introduced in the horns, becoming the main theme of the movement. A trumpet blast of Reveille announces the coda, where Wake Nicodemus, Pig Town Fling, and Columbia are sounded simultaneously, climaxing in one of the greatest symphonic pies-in-the-face ever hurled by a composer at his audience.

Ives had originally planned a cycle of overtures called Men of Literature. Only the Robert Browning Overture was completed, sketches for others finding their way into the Concord Sonata and much else. If the Second Symphony is one of Ives's most accessible works, the Robert Browning Overture is one of his most challenging. Ives was never satisfied with his attempt to evoke what he described as Browning's 'surge into the baffling unknown' and later repudiated the work. Its mysterious introduction is interrupted by a seething passage in the strings and an angular, atonal march whose theme is played in a series of canons between brass, woodwinds, and strings. Following a highly dissonant climax, an Adagio provides some repose. The return to the opening material and an extended recapitulation of the densely scored, canonic march, climaxes with a long-held pedal G-sharp and a ferociously dissonant chord, resolving into one of Ives's 'shadow chords.' Brief overlapping solos for the brass take us into the densely polyrhythmic coda. The work shrieks to a stop, revealing the opening chords of the Adagio, played almost imperceptibly in the strings. Joshua Cheek

More About this Recording

CHARLES IVES (1874-1954)

Robert Browning Overture 00:24:48
Symphony No. 2

Orchestra –  Nashville Symphony Orchestra
Conductor –  Kenneth Schermerhorn

VILLA-LOBOS : Bachianas Brasileiras (Complete) (Schermerhorn) 3CD (2005) APE (tracks+.cue), lossless

All too often, box sets with the complete this or the collected that represent a by-the-pound mentality that's ultimately destructive to classical music, a substitute for intelligent program selection that entertains and instructs. The nine Bachianas Brasileiras of Heitor Villa-Lobos, however, may be the exception. Often excerpted (the two-movement No. 5, for voice and eight cellos is the most famous, with its Yma Sumac-like opening vocalise), they give the listener something more to think about when played from start to finish -- they reveal the variety of which Villa-Lobos was capable even when working within the triple set of constraints he established for himself. The Bachianas Brasileiras are, as the name implies, Brazilian tributes to J.S. Bach. Each movement of each of the nine pieces has a title and a recognizable shape corresponding to a common Baroque form (there are several prelude-fugue or toccata-fugue pairs, for instance), plus a Brazilian program or evocative Portuguese tempo indication. No. 2, for example, evokes a train trip across Brazil, and it's a delightful work without a trace of the implacable Futurist grimness of other modern train pieces. Additionally, Villa-Lobos uses Brazilian popular rhythms, sometimes front and center, sometimes lurking in shadow.
Yet the nine Bachianas Brasileiras sound quite different from one another, and hearing them all illuminates Villa-Lobos' imagination in dealing with a set of ideas that might easily have turned into an exercise. The instrumentation is fundamentally varied, for one thing; No. 1 is for an all-cello orchestra, No. 3 is a piano concerto; No. 6 is for flute and bassoon. Beyond that, Villa-Lobos wrings a whole range of expressive stances and emotional states out of his self-imposed vocabulary. Some movements are dramatic, some have a kind of exotic calm that form a sort of Brazilian counterpart to the evocation of American space that Copland made out of his French training, some are bracing neo-Classic essays. The most interesting insight to come from hearing all the Bachianas Brasileiras together, in fact, may be the realization of how French they are in spite of all their Brazilianisms and Baroque moves. (Villa-Lobos, like Copland, went to Paris during its glorious 1920s.) The Nashville Symphony under Kenneth Schermerhorn is workmanlike and sometimes more -- the cellos do not have the sheen that is often present when the big American orchestras cherry-pick these works, but the performers are comfortable within the modest orchestral dimensions of these pieces, and Schermerhorn avoids the overwrought quality they are sometimes given. The sound, in sessions recorded patchwork over some months in a university auditorium, is subpar, but the set will appeal to the growing body of listeners interested in orchestral music of the Americas. James Manheim