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Ives: Romanzo di Central Park
Five out of five stars "Finley has everything and more in his darkly full-bodied voice" The Times
Five out of five stars "... [Finley] is in splendid form throughout, his legato is exquisite..." musicalcriticism.com
Five out of five stars “…highly recommendable to all lovers of fine songs and fine singing” BBC Music Magazine
Composer: Charles Ives
Performers:
· Gerald Finley
· Julius Drake
· Magnus Johnston (obbligato violin)
Label: Hyperion, CDA67644
Recording details: February 2007, All Saints,
Durham Road, East Finchley, London, United Kingdom
Release date: 28 January 2008
ASIN: B0011FEGVM
Track listing (Click each title to hear a sample of the track)
1. On the Counter: 'Tunes we heard in 'ninety two', soft and sweet'
2. The Circus Band: 'All summer long, we boys'
3. Two Little Flowers, and dedicated to them: 'On sunny days in our backyard'
4. Ilmenau: 'Über allen Gipfeln'
5. A Night Song: 'The young May moon is beaming, love'
6. Down East: 'Songs! Visions of my homeland'
7. Premonitions: 'There's a shadow on the grass'
8. The See'r: 'An old man with a straw in his mouth'
10. In the Alley: 'On my way to work one summer day'
11. Mists: 'Low lie the mists'
12. They are there! 'There's a time in many a life'
14. The South Wind: 'When gently blows the South Wind'
15. My native land
16. Watchman!
17. The Children's Hour: 'Between the dark and the daylight'
18. Evidence: 'There comes o'er the valley a shadow'
19. The World's Wanderers: 'Tell me, Star, whose wings of light'
20. Slow March: 'One evening just at sunset we laid him in the grave'
21. Omens and Oracles: 'Phantoms of the future, spectres of the past'
23. Allegro: 'By morning's brightest beams'
24. Evening: 'Now came still Evening on, and Twilight gray'
25. The Last Reader: 'I sometimes sit beneath a tree'
26. To Edith: 'So like a flower, thy little four-year face in its pure freshness'
27. At the River: 'Shall we gather at the river'
28. A Christmas Carol: 'Little Star of Bethlehem!'
29. The Light that is Felt: 'A tender child of summers three'
30. Romanzo, di Central Park: 'Grove'
Press release, Jan 2008
In a second disc of Ives's songs, the unbeatable partnership of Finley and Drake again enthral their listeners and bring them to the emotional core of each work.
The range of style and approach in Ives's text-setting is startling—from simple, sentimental ballads to complex and strenuous philosophical discourses, sometimes encompassing the most dissonant and virtuosic piano parts, sometimes with the accompaniment pared down to an almost minimalist phrase-repetition. Even those composed in a superficially conventional or 'polite' tonal idiom usually contain harmonic, rhythmic or accentual surprises somewhere.
A particular beauty is Mists, composed in 1910. The poem is by Ives's wife Harmony—an elegy after her mother's sudden death that year. The manuscript, written while on vacation at Elk Lake in the Adirondacks, is dated 'last mist at Pell's Sep 20 1910. This exquisite and deeply felt setting, with its brume of Impressionistic harmonies in contrary motion, is among Ives's most atmospheric songs. This thrilling collection also includes Ives's War Songs and settings of Goethe.
What the critics say
Peter Grahame Woolf for musicalpointers.co.uk, 22 January 2008
http://www.musicalpointers.co.uk/reviews/cddvd/IvesFinley-2.html
Hyperion's second disc of Ives songs more than fulfills the promise of the first volume (2004) and may they long continue. The range covered here is again vast, from tonal simplicity to complex harmonic exploration well ahead of its time, with dense textures putting huge demands upon the pianist, and including a group of War Songs. Again, authoritative notes from Calum MacDonald, and presentation with full texts, which can perhaps be left to a second hearing, so good is Finley's diction. For two of the songs there are violin obbligatti, a feature of song performances of the time…
Sarah Urwin Jones, The Times, 26 January 2008
Rating: 
The first collection of Charles Ives’s songs by Finley marked him out as a vibrant interpreter of the American iconoclast. This second collection confirms the accolade. Ives had an eclectic palette, from the stomping, mismatched march of The Circus Band to the quiet Ilmenau, a setting of Goethe.
Finley has everything and more in his darkly full-bodied voice to match the often formidable technical and expressive requirements of Ives’s songbook – reinforced by Drake’s elastic, expressive piano. There may be the merest hint of a vocal wobble, every now and then, but it’s all done in quest of interpretation. This is a must-buy album.
Hugo Shirley for musicalcriticism.com, 27 January 2008
http://www.musicalcriticism.com/recordings/cd-finley-ives-0108.shtml
Rating:
Hot on the heels of a widely admired recording of Barber songs, Gerald Finley and Julius Drake bring us their second disc of songs by Charles Ives and it finds them in similarly fine form. Ives' songs cover a wide range of musical styles and registers, capturing the composer in candid, unbuttoned guise as well in experimental mode. Finley and Drake react keenly to the demands made upon them: the modest and personal songs are treated with a disarming directness; they resist the temptation to wallow in some of the more sentimental writing and are fully up to the challenge of the bigger numbers.
The poetic sources range from modest, highly personal verses by Ives himself (including 'Slow march', an elegy for the family cat, probably his earliest song) through to Goethe in German ('Ilmenau'). Ives' familiarity with German Lieder is unmistakable throughout: 'Songs my mother taught me' and 'Down East', for example, reminded me of Wolf (particularly the floating, hazy piano counterpoint introduced around two minutes into the latter); 'Omens and Oracles' rises to an ecstatic, almost Lisztian climax. While 'Mists' has an impressionistic accompaniment that Debussy would be proud of, the boisterousness of 'Circus Band' and the cock-sure patriotism of 'They are there!' seem to have a tinge of Mahlerian irony.
Songs like 'Watchman' and 'The see'r' show Ives pushing into more daring harmonic territory while 'Romanzo di Central Park', which gives the disc its name, is a setting of a poem by Leigh Hunt that has just one word per line (here, as in 'They are there!', Finley and Drake are joined by violinist Magnus Johnston). Other songs have a simplicity and straightforwardness of expression that's all Ives' own: listen for example to 'The South wind' or 'My native land'. These and the settings of texts by Ives and his wife are glimpses into the composer's domestic life that no other works afford us.
Although there's a broad range of styles on show here the composer rarely does what we expect of him. The seemingly straightforward songs never quite develop as one might predict and even the nightingale evoked in 'Evening' has an air of capricious mischief. Finley and Drake adjust to the different interpretative demands made upon them with consummate artistry so in just the first four songs we have Finley as Ives himself reminiscing suavely about his favourite old tunes in 'On the counter', as a young boy singing of his crush for the 'lady all in pink' against Drake's 'Circus band', as the doting father in 'Two little flowers' and as the Wanderer of German Romanticism in 'Ilmenau'. Vocally, the baritone is in splendid form throughout, his legato is exquisite in 'Slow march', his top notes ringing in 'Omens and oracles', and his rallying cry in 'They are there!' rousing.
What makes this disc so enjoyable, though, is not only the exemplary performances but the fact that these songs simply contain so much wonderful music. Ives' melodic gift is not always to the fore in his orchestral works but in these intimate miniatures it sounds like he's simply enjoying himself, composing one delightful melody after another. Fans of Gerald Finley needn't hesitate and for anyone not familiar with Ives' songs, I can't recommend this disc highly enough as an introduction.
Matthew Rye, the Telegraph 2 February 2008
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2008/02/02/bmclascds102.xml
The best of the new releases:
This is a highly successful follow-up to Gerald Finley and Julius Drake's first Ives recital from 2005. Here there is the same sort of mix, from familiar songs such as The Circus Band and Watchman! to an early requiem for the family cat and the intriguing title song, Romanzo (di Central Park), with its obbligato violin part atmospherically played by Magnus Johnston.
Finley is his usual charismatic self, at home as much in the hymnody as the parody, and he is careful not to over-sentimentalise the more homely numbers while injecting pathos into the war songs. Drake projects Ives's often complex accompaniments with clarity and style.
The Times, 1 February 2008
The best classical CDs of 2008
Which albums have impressed the critics this year?
JANUARY
Jonas Kaufmann: Romantic Arias: His voice sounds like a cross between the glowing Wunderlich and the gritty Vickers, and he excels here.
Gerald Finley, Julius Drake: Romanzo di Central Park: Finley has everything and more in his darkly full-bodied voice to match the often formidable technical and expressive requirements of Ives’s songbook.
Belcea Quartet: Bartok String Quartets: Still a young group, the Belcea Quartet play Bartók’s six masterly string quartets with the passion, technical command and folk inflections that most musicians only dream of.
Mark Padmore, Craig Ogden, Elizabeth Kenny: Dowland, Lute Songs; Britten, Nocturnal: Padmore is an ideal exponent, a singer with a remarkable capacity for intimacy and softly sculpted diction
Anthony Burton relishes Gerald Finley's latest album
BBC Music Magazine, March 2008
Click here for BBC Music magazine online edition (page 9) http://cde.cerosmedia.com/1G47ab243fb1c0d012.cde
PERFORMANCE *****
SOUND *****
Fine follow-up for Ives
Reviewing the first Ives anthology by Gerald Finley and Julius Drake in September 2005, I noted with pleasure that the selection left 'plenty of first-rate material for at least one companion disc'. Now here is a second volume, ranging from Ives's earliest surviving song - a requiem for a family cat incorporating Handel quotations - to the profound 'Evening' written just in time for inclusion in his 1922 publication of 114 Songs. There are favourites such as 'The See'r' and 'At the River', alongside many less familiar numbers. And Magnus Johnston's violin brings a variety of colouring to the wartime song 'They are There!' and the tide song, 'Romanzo di Central Park', a gleeful parody of the sentimental arias penned by Victor Herbert.
A few quibbles: the second half of 'The Circus Band' is too slow to capture the intended swing of a Sousa quick march; the mystic 'Premonitions' seems to get too loud too soon; the early 'Christmas Carol' has rests of a half-bar here instead of a full bar. But these are not significant enough for me to withhold any stars from a disc that's outstandingly well sung and played, equally well recorded, and highly recommendable to all lovers of fine songs and fine singing.
Stephen Pettitt, Sunday Times, 17 February 2008
Gerald Finley's second volume of songs by Charles Ives includes another 30 examples of an art whose surface can seem cloyingly sentimental or bombastically patriotic, utterly reactionary or chaotically radical, naive or subtle and philosophical. Yet every song is born out of genuine reaction and reflection. That's as much the case in the seemingly banal The Circus Band as it is in the ripe lyricism of the Goethe setting Ilmenau, or in the astonishing traversing of moods of Premonitions. Finley understands this as well as anybody. He's in finer, mellower voice than ever, and weighs and colours everything to perfection. His pianist, Julius Drake, astute though he is, maybe understates his role.
Andrew Clements, the Guardian,
22 February 2008
http://music.guardian.co.uk/classical/reviews/story/0,,2258934,00.html
Rating: Four stars out of five
Gerald Finley and Julius Drake's first collection of songs by Ives was one of the outstanding discs of 2005, and their second anthology is almost as fine. It ranges from Ives's first setting - lamenting the death of the family cat - to some of the final additions to the volume of 114 songs which the composer published in 1922. Some of the songs are among his best known, The Circus Band, At the River, The See'r, while the one that gives the disc its title, Romanzo di Central Park, is a wicked parody of the schmaltzy popularity of Victor Herbert. Finley is a wonderfully assured interpreter of all of them, perfectly registering their switchback changes of mood and presenting their occasional lapses into sentimentality with total conviction. More than any other performers on disc, Finley and Drake establish these songs, with all their quirks and flights of fantasy, among the most important of the 20th century in any language.
David Shengold, Opera News, June 2008, vol 72 , no.12
With this highly pleasing disc, recorded in February 2007, Gerald Finley, Julius Drake and Hyperion follow up 2005's A Song for Anything, an excellent treatment of thirty-one songs, with another all-Ives collection (all in all, the quirky American master left 114 such works) totaling thirty cuts.
Many Ives songs can seem rather frugal of melodic interest at first hearing, but repeated listening to a collection such as this reveals genuine delights of phrase and harmony. These are, by and large, not songs for "showy" singers, yet several of the numbers more citational of popular song (a key element in Ives's sound world) do demand some verbal panache, which the Canadian bass-baritone can certainly supply, along with fine-honed dynamic control and a warm, solidly delineated tone. As Finley's intonation is in general so sure, a habit of tuning up slightly flat high attacks (evident at the end of his very first phrase here) seems more pronounced. Drake, very sensitive as to tempo and mood, proves willing to haul out the trombones when needed.
There is one German-language song — "Ilmenau," a rather polite setting of Goethe's "Über alles Gipfen ist Ruh'," so sublimely served by Schubert. Ives's version is pleasant enough, but Finley, like Ives, is naturally better in English than in German. The composer also subtly reworked the Robert Lowry hymn "Shall we gather at the river?" and set an English translation of the Adolf Heyduk poem Dvořák used in the immortal encore "Songs my mother taught me."
Nostalgia balances with distancing irony in the composer's output, and Finley and Drake command the full spectrum of expression between the two. Their two all-Ives CDs stand tall in elite company. In the 1990s,
Albany released a complete Ives Songs edition in four volumes with — among other less incisive singers — tenor Paul Sperry and William Sharp, a musicianly baritone whose fine instrument is not unlike that of Finley. Among other superior solo efforts, that by Jan de Gaetani and Gilbert Kalish (Nonesuch) is noteworthy for the lyric mezzo's telling restraint and exceptional tonal clarity; two volumes by Roberta Alexander with Tan Crone (Etcetera) showcase the soprano's expressive eloquence and rich lower register.