Ives - Symphonies Nos 3 and 4

The Guardian 80

Bavouzet/Melbourne Symphony Orchestra/Davis
(Chandos)

The Fourth Symphony is perhaps Charles Ives’s supreme achievement. A century after most of the work on the score was finished, and more than 50 years after its first complete performance, its multilayered complexities still present a formidable test for any conductor and orchestra, and make a natural benchmark for Andrew Davis’s Ives series with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. He focuses the music’s muscularity and its astonishing changes of perspective and mood with total assurance. Capturing all the teeming ideas is as much of a challenge for sound engineers, too, but this recording, with the solo piano, played by Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, more than usually prominent, teases everything out with marvellous clarity.

The much more accommodating Third Symphony, “The Camp Meeting”, is included on the disc, perhaps sounding a bit more civilised than it needs to be. There are also the three pieces of Orchestral Set No 2, relatively little known, but unmistakably belonging to the same world of mystery and wonder as the Fourth Symphony. The last of them, From Hanover Square North, at the End of a Tragic Day, the Voice of the People Again Arose, Ives’s impression of New York’s reaction to the news of the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915, is as remarkable as anything he wrote.