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Ives: A Song - For Anything (CD)
TOP TEN RECORDS OF THE YEAR - The Sunday Times
CD OF THE WEEK - The Sunday Times
One of THE BEST CLASSICAL CDs OF THE YEAR 2005 - The Financial Times
FANFARE BEST OF 2006
Five out of five stars - BBC Music Magazine
“Audiences have rarely had the opportunity to hear such superb singing of Ives…. one of the finest recorded tributes ever paid to Charles Ives.”
Composer: Charles Ives
Performers:
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Gerald Finley
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Julius Drake
Audio CD (29 Aug 2005)
Number of Discs: 1
Label: Hyperion
ASIN: B000A7XJI8
Click each track title to hear a music sample:
2. The Things our Fathers Loved
3. Memories: (A) Very Pleasant; (B) Rather Sad
4. The Housatonic at Stockbridge
5. Swimmers
6. The Cage
8. General William Booth Enters into Heaven
9. Remembrance
10. Berceuse
11. West London
12. Tom Sails Away
13. When Stars are in the Quiet Skies
14. Weil’ auf mir
15. Ich grolle nicht
16. Du alte Mutter
17. Where the Eagle
18. Walking
19. Yellow Leaves
20. The Side Show
21. Élégie
22. The New River
24. Ann Street
26. Thoreau
27. Serenity
28. Tolerance
29. Charlie Rutlage
30. ‘1, 2, 3’
Photo from Julius Drake's website: http://www.juliusdrake.com/
What the critics say
Click here for an article from "Musikfreunde" about Gerald Finley and this recording (among other things)
Andrew Clements for The Guardian, September 9, 2005
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/critic/review/0,,1565517,00.html
Five out of five stars
Baritone Gerald Finley includes 31 songs by Charles Ives in his hugely impressive collection, nearly all of them taken from the set of 114 that the composer collected for publication in the 1920s. His pick inevitably includes the masterpieces - The Housatonic at Stockbridge, The Things Our Fathers Loved, and the epic General William Booth Enters Into Heaven - but scatters them among smaller-scale and less familiar settings, so that the mood and focus constantly shift.
The result confirms Ives as one of the great 20th-century songwriters, a composer with an extraordinary ability to match musical scale and expressive weight so that intense emotions are contained with the tiniest frames. Finley's meticulously shaded performances, as well as Julius Drake's projection of the sometimes titanic piano parts, catch that intensity to the full.
Classic FM Magazine
Andrew Stewart for Classic FM magazine, November 2005
Five stars out of five [Exceptional]
Like Richard Strauss, Ives wrote songs from his earliest creative years to his last. The American composer's output for solo voice reflects its close connection to place, above all the Housatonic Valley, Connecticut, spanning everything from the folksy, by way of the sentimental, to the transcendental. Gerald Finley and Julian Drake flourish in Ives's complex, often contradictory, never dull musical world. Listen to 'Swimmers' and the extraordinary 'General William Boot', and I swear you'll be hooked.
Joseph K. So, The Music Scene, Ontario, Spring 2006 Vol 4.3
Rating 5 out of 6 stars
Ives wrote some 200 songs, but they are underrepresented on disc. Thomas Hampson and Susan Graham each recorded a few, but to me this new collection of 31 songs is definitive. Brilliantly sung by Canadian baritone Gerald Finley, it has become the gold standard by which all future recordings of these pieces will be measured. Finley meets the daunting vocal and dramatic challenges with total commitment and superb musicianship. There is unfailing beauty of tone in the lyrical songs (‘Memories’; ‘Tom Sails Away’). In the more declamatory songs (‘General Booth’; ‘Charlie Rutlage’) he is unabashedly theatrical, complete with cowboy drawl. The songs are mostly in English except for three in German (including one set to the famous Heine text ‘Ich grolle nicht’) and one in French (‘Élégie’). One would be hard-pressed to find a better collaborative pianist than Julius Drake, who even makes vocal contributions – in ‘Memories’ and ‘Charlie Rutlage’! Given its legal troubles, Hyperion is brave to take on this adventurous project. The critical success of this disc is richly deserved.
John W Freeman for Opera News, February 2006 , vol 70 , no.8
There can be few challenges in the song repertory to rival those posed by Charles Ives, with his panoramic palette of moods, his anything-goes approach to harmony and to the human voice. Ives lets the singer play the huckster, the town crier, the minister — anybody and everybody. The listener feels as though he’s met a sampler of Americans from a rich period in our history. Nobody who tackles a cross-section of these songs is equally lucky with all of them, but Gerald Finley comes awfully close. It’s odd, in a way appropriate to Ives’s own idiosyncrasies, that it took a Canadian baritone and British pianist to capture that down-home Yankee flavor, which often evades even our own native singers when they’re too busy trying to get the quirky music right. One false nuance in the tone of voice, and you’re done for.
Patter, as in “Memories: A. Very Pleasant” (“We’re sitting in the opera house,” marked by Ives “As fast as it will go”), is one of the less taut strings to Finley’s bow, but in “The Greatest Man,” he manages to sound just like some rube kid (“In a half boasting and half wistful way — Not too fast or too evenly”). This could be straight out of Tom Sawyer. As the program unfolds, there’s always what you’re not expecting next — moments of piety or exultation, sarcasm or simple grief. When you’re done, you’ve heard one of the most stimulating and provocative of song recitals, as well as one of the most varied and difficult.
Schoenberg, who wasn’t known for his charity toward other composers, singled out Ives early on as a fellow pioneer. Indeed, when Ives goes far out, he goes all the way. But with Ives, as with Schoenberg, one also starts to suspect that beneath that crusty exterior beats the heart of a Brahmsian Romantic, determined not to give himself away. Finley and his protean keyboard partner, Julius Drake, turn out to be just the right ones to bring us into Ives’s world. Thanks to what must have been murderously hard preparation, they’re able to conceal it and swing right into the songs.
Scott Mortensen for Musicweb-international.com
http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2006/Jan06/Ives_songs_CDA67516.htm
Charles Ives’ song legacy presents a unique challenge to its interpreters. His songs derive from an enormously wide variety of musical traditions, from the German lied tradition - and European art song in general - to American parlor songs, hymns and folk tunes. In addition, Ives’ own relentless experimentation, which often bore little resemblance to anything that preceded him, led to a body of works that still presents formidable challenges to any performer, regardless of their background. In short, how many singers are capable of singing like Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau one moment and an authentic Texas cowboy the next?
Aside from stylistic variety, the songs also call for an enormous range of emotional responses: from mystical speculations about God and Nature to a small child’s meandering talk about his father, from abstruse philosophical contemplations to sentimental recollections of days gone by, from the profoundly serious to the rowdiest high jinks. All of these present yet further challenges to any artist who chooses to perform them.
Gerald Finley possesses a manly yet vulnerable baritone voice that’s quite remarkable. Pianist Julius Drake is a much-lauded accompanist. They have recorded an impressive recital.
Some of the most effective songs are the foreign language pieces. For the most part, these are more traditional than Ives’ other works; most were composed during his early years. Even so, these songs are so wonderfully performed that I found myself acquiring a new appreciation for their vitality. The first song in the recital, "Feldeinsamkeit", sets the tone for much of the set. It is deliciously inward and hefty, very much in the German lied tradition. There is a prevailing sense of loss and melancholy, and the same could be said of all of the German language pieces. They may not be Ives’ most original works, but I have never heard them performed so convincingly. The same could also be said of "Élégie", a French language work. It’s shockingly beautiful - a great performance. This is a work to pull out when anyone claims that Ives was incapable of writing beautiful, traditional music. This is intoxicating, and I can’t imagine anyone doing it better.
The more traditional English language songs are also perfectly realized. In songs like "Berceuse" and "Remembrance" Finley’s velvety baritone and Drake’s limpid pianism lead to very memorable performances. The duo interprets many songs using a more meditative approach than I have heard before, and the results are usually compelling. For instance, you might compare Finley and Drake’s performance of "The Things Our Fathers Loved" with that by Thomas Stewart and Alan Mandel (Columbia Records, M-30229, out of print LP). Stewart is more sentimental, less heavy, whereas Finley’s performance is characterized by a greater sense of loss. It’s more elegiac. Both performances are convincing, even if they are different.
I find the less traditional songs from Ives’ mature period to be more of a mixed bag. Some of them are wholly successful. For example, Finley’s performance of "The Housatonic at Stockbridge" is outstanding, even if doesn’t culminate in the same degree of ecstatic abandon as some others. "Tom Sails Away" is also excellent. Finley does a superb job of portraying the protagonist’s recollected memories, almost as if he is whispering them to himself. Their performance of "West London" is also very fine. I should make special mention of Finley’s singing in this difficult song; the lead-in is breath-taking.
There several problems with the less successful songs. In their case Julius Drake’s piano suffers rhythmic and dynamic weakness. For example, in "General Booth Enters into Heaven," the pianist’s playing has a measured quality where there should be ecstatic abandon. Finley’s singing is excellent - despite a bit of over-enunciating - but the work is undermined by Drake’s restraint. Also, sometimes the works just don’t sound "American" enough. This might be a matter of accents (as in "Charlie Rutlage," where Finley’s southern accent isn’t convincing) or a matter of holding back where other interpreters belt it out.
I don’t want to imply that any of these songs are poorly done. Finley has an incredible voice, and the overall impact of the disc is impressive. Even more importantly, this disc offers some of the most convincing renditions of Ives’ earlier, more traditional songs that I’ve ever heard. I enthusiastically recommend it to all who are interested in Charles Ives or art song in general.
Matthew Rye for The Telegraph Classical CDs of the week:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2005/10/08/bmclascds.xml
There has been something of a revival of interest in Charles Ives's song output in the past few years. Following on from recent contributions by Thomas Hampson (RCA) and Susan Graham (Warner) to discs containing instrumental and other works comes this purely vocal recital from the Canadian Gerald Finley, one of the few baritones around who can match Hampson's natural charisma and transatlantic ease in this music.
His selection, from the roughly 200 songs left to us, includes such familiar items as Memories, Charlie Rutlage and Serenity, but also a number rarely encountered, including a handful in German (not least Heine's Ich grolle nicht) and one in French.
This range calls for a voice of great flexibility, which Finley exhibits in singing that at will can be wickedly humorous (Slugging a Vampire), touchingly heartfelt (Tom Sails Away) or transcendentally awed (Thoreau). Julius Drake is an ever resourceful accompanist, matching Finley's ability to span Ives's breadth from Victorian ballad style to polytonal modernism. The recorded sound has a naturalism of its own.
Joshua Kosman San Francisco Chronicle September 11, 2005
Canadian baritone Gerald Finley is about to debut with the San Francisco Opera, playing the title role of physicist Robert Oppenheimer in next month's world premiere of John Adams' "Doctor Atomic." His new disc, a well-mixed collection of 31 Charles Ives songs accompanied by pianist Julius Drake, reveals an artist of considerable grace and vitality, with a pliant vocal tone and splendid articulation. Finley boasts a warm, appealingly focused baritone with enough power to bring off sweeping numbers like "General William Booth Enters Into Heaven" but plenty of flexibility as well. His attention to the poetic texts, even those of less than earthshaking quality, is meticulous, and the result is a recital that is both engaging and terrifically precise. Oddly, Finley seems most at home with Ives' most overtly artsy vein; in more plain-spoken songs he sounds stagey and somewhat uncertain. --
Clayton Henderson, operatoday.com, 2 Dec 2005
http://www.operatoday.com/content/2005/12/songs_of_vaugha.php
[Extract]
…That the songs of RVW are better known than those of Ives is not in doubt. Perhaps this is because many may not yet have heard baritone Gerald Finley’s recent recording of these Ives pieces. Audiences have rarely had the opportunity to hear such superb singing of Ives. Add to this the dynamic, always sensitive, accompanying of Julius Drake and the result is one of the finest recorded tributes ever paid to Charles Ives. The thirty one songs that Finley and Drake have included constitute about one-fifth of Ives’s output and cover an astonishing range of moods, subjects, and musical language. Eclectic is the perfect word for these songs. Here is music modeled on that of nineteenth-century German romantics, a song about a cowboy, a fiery evangelist, the reclusive Henry David Thoreau, the bittersweet memories of youth, and of an eagle and a vampire, to mention only a few. The Romantic Ives, evident in such songs as Feldeinsamkeit, Weil’ auf mir, and Ich grolle nicht will surprise those listeners who know Ives primarily from his thornier songs like The Cage and Where the Eagle. If one thinks only of a common image of Ives as a curmudgeonly old bearded man with a cane, the poignancy of words and matching music in Tom Sails Away and The Greatest Man will come as a revelation. The humorous Ives turns up in The Side Show, where a musical quotation from Tchaikovsky underlines the moment when “poor Mister Riley look[s] a bit like a Russian dance.” For sheer loveliness and gentleness, it is hard to beat The Housatonic at Stockbridge and Remembrance. Then there is General William Booth Enters Into Heaven—a song that is undoubtedly Ives’s masterpiece. Ives’s music and poet Vachel Lindsay’s words evoke the founder of the Salvation Army, this “great preacher of redemption” in what becomes an operatic scene in its dramatic juxtapositions of moods and emotions.
Gerald Finley is a master at capturing the many moods of these songs, his interpretations matching perfectly Ives’s music, from its quirky moments to those of incredible serenity and loveliness. Pianist Julius Drake’s performance complements Finley at every move. The combination of Finley, Drake, and Ives in A Song—For Anything. Songs by Charles Ives will surely succeed in bringing new audiences to the songs of Ives and in reaffirming to Ives’s aficionados his stature as a major vocal composer of the twentieth century. It is difficult to imagine a finer recording of this music. Finley and Drake have set a very high standard for future interpreters of Ives’s songs.
Anthony Burton, BBC Music Magazine
Rating: Performance: Five out of five stars
Rating: Sound: Five out of five stars
Charles Ives was a great song writer, capable of encapsulating emotion, evocation, experiment or a good joke in a page or two with consummate artistry and utter individuality. This generous selection of 31 songs, most chosen from the volume of 114 he published at his own expense in 1922, ranges from early ballads and settings of German and French poems to squibs such as The Cage and 1, 2, 3, intense meditations such as The Things Our Fathers Loved and Tom Sails Away, and the epic General William Booth Enters into Heaven. There’s a judicious balance between familiar and less familiar, too, leaving plenty of first-rate material for at least one companion disc. And that’s good news, because this one is outstanding. The Canadian baritone Gerald Finley has a voice of great beauty, but it’s always under the control of his penetrating intelligence: he risks bending pitches for expressive effect, and he adapts his golden timbre and almost English diction to the childlike tones of The Greatest Man and the cowboy drawl of Charlie Rutlage. Julius Drake is an equally versatile pianist, adept alike in simplicity and complexity. The recording is excellent, though on a couple of tracks the piano tuning is in need of retouching. Overall, a disc offering sustained illumination and enjoyment.
The Best Classical Recordings, 2005
Andrew Clark, Financial Times, 9 December 2005
[Extract]
… My prize …in the vocal category, to Gerald Finley's Ives disc (Hyperion), the perfect match of singer to song…