Ives: Songs, Vol. 6

"The final volume of Naxos's complete songs of Charles Ives offers the same virtues as its predecessors: assured performances from gifted young singers and pianists accompanied by pithy, informative notes from Richard Whitehouse. While some may object to the alphabetical organisation, you can afford to buy them all at bargain price and make your own selection. I was particularly struck this time around by the beauty of Ives's German settings, while the gruff humour of his musical experiments is aptly represented by the wild trio of pianos that accompany 'Vote for Names, Names, Names', a political satire that has not lost its relevance."
(Five Stars BBC Music)

When, in 1922, Charles Ives published a volume entitled 114 Songs, he was indirectly drawing attention to the fact that the genre had played a central part in his output. 85 years on and, for all that his wider reputation may now rest on his orchestral, chamber and piano music, songs represent the heart of his creative thinking. Nor was that initial volume comprehensive; Ives having written almost 200 songs, of which this present edition includes all those he completed. The expressive variety encountered is accordingly vast: indeed, the gradual evolution of Ives's songwriting, from those drawing overtly on the Austro-German Lieder and English parlour-song traditions to ones that evince anarchic humour as keenly as others do a profound vision, is analogous to the evolution of American music over the last quarter of the nineteenth and the first quarter of the twentieth centuries.

Although it would be possible to collate Ives's songs according to type, the alphabetic approach adopted by this edition ensures each volume (of which this is the sixth and last) contains a representative crosssection of his achievement. A wide range of poets is set (Ives could be highly interventionist when it suited his purpose), including (mainly early) German settings as well as forays into French and Italian writers. Moreover, the temporal distance (1887-1926) traversed by the songs is as little compared to their stylistic diversity or their emotional range.