Ives Symphonies 1 and 2 – Mehta

Charles Ives never heard his First Symphony. Let’s get that straight before we go any further, because the record has muddied this point before, and it matters. He died in 1954; the piece waited until 1966 for its premiere, played complete, long after the old crank in West Redding had gone to wherever cranky New England transcendentalist composers go. He knew the Second only because he happened to catch it on the radio — Bernstein and the Philharmonic, 1951 — and even then he couldn’t be bothered to leave the house and hear it live. That tells you something about the man. Ives always insisted he heard everything perfectly well in his head, thank you, and didn’t need an orchestra to confirm it. Maybe so. But it left these two early symphonies orphaned for decades, unperformed, unloved, waiting for conductors brave enough — or foolish enough, depending on your view of Yale-trained juvenilia — to take them on.

Zubin Mehta was one of the braver ones. His Los Angeles Philharmonic recordings of the First and Second, made in the analog twilight of the 1970s, have circulated under more labels than I can keep straight — Decca, London, the “Double Decca” bargain twofer, and now this Australian Eloquence reissue, which restores things to a cleaner single-disc format with the Schuman orchestration of Variations on “America” thrown in as a make-weight. Anyone assembling an Ives shelf should know the Second Symphony interpretation here is identical to the one on the old Decca Double — same tapes, same splices, nothing new under the sun except the artwork. Caveat emptor, or rather caveat collector: don’t buy the same Mehta twice by accident.

The First Symphony is fascinating precisely because it tries so hard not to be Ives. Horatio Parker, his forbidding composition teacher at Yale, wanted well-behaved harmony and Boston-approved form, and got it, mostly. You can hear young Charles suppressing himself — a hymn tune wanting to sneak in through the back door, then thinking better of it. The opening movement launches with a tune so confident, so immediately singable, that it recalls nothing so much as Dvořák’s Symphony No. 8, written not so many years earlier just across town at the National Conservatory — Dvořák who had come to New York at Mrs. Thurber’s invitation to found an American school, ironically training up a generation of native symphonists just as Ives, unbeknownst to anyone, was quietly absorbing the lesson better than the assigned students. The slow movement’s cor anglais solo is so close kin to the New World’s “Largo” that one wonders if Parker ever noticed, or whether he simply enjoyed it too much to mark it down.

Mehta’s performance is warm, unapologetic, and — crucially — he trims the repeats. Good instinct. This is a young man’s symphony, four years in the writing, occasionally guilty of saying twice what needed saying once, and a director who lets the argument breathe rather than insisting on every exposition repeat does the piece a favor. The string section digs into the big Tchaikovskian arches of the finale with unembarrassed sumptuousness; there’s a burnished quality to the LA strings, a sheen that some will find almost too Hollywood for a Connecticut choirmaster’s son, but which serves the music’s frank late-Romantic ambitions rather than fighting them. I should note — and too many writers on this disc have missed it — that there’s a substantial cut in the last movement. It’s been there since the original release, unremarked by Mehta or his producers, and it will matter to purists even if the average listener will not sense anything missing. Know it’s there.

The Second Symphony is where the real Ives starts elbowing his way into the room — “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean” jostling against a Stephen Foster tune, a fuguing hymn tacked onto a college drinking song, that famous Bronx cheer of a final chord that still gets a nervous laugh in the concert hall sixty years on. Mehta handles the collage with real theatrical instinct; he understands that Ives’s vernacular quotations aren’t decoration; they’re structural, load-bearing, the whole architecture of American memory holding up what looks otherwise like a fairly conventional five-movement symphonic frame. Compare this with Dohnányi’s later, more polished, somewhat over-groomed Cleveland account — gorgeous playing, cooler blood. Mehta’s version has grit under the fingernails. It sounds lived-in, unbuttoned, occasionally a little raucous, which is exactly right.

If you already own the Decca Double set, you have most of this. If you don’t, and want a single generous disc that catches Ives at the beginning of the journey — Parker’s obedient pupil on one hand, the orneriest original voice in American music already stirring on the other — this Eloquence reissue does the job admirably, cut and all.