Ives/Brant - A Concord Symphony; Copland - Organ Symphony
San Francisco Symphony; Michael Tilson Thomas
SFSMedia 821936-0038-2
The four movements of Charles Ives’s Concord Sonata for piano (published in 1919 at Ives’s own expense along with his philosophical Essays Before A Sonata) are entitled Emerson, Hawthorne, The Alcotts and Thoreau – all leading authors of the American Transcendentalist school. Ives’ visionary writing is similarly “transcendent” and extremely challenging for performer and listener alike. Canadian-born composer, teacher and professional orchestrator Henry Brant had a particular affection for this groundbreaking work and set out to transcribe it for orchestra, a labour of love that occupied him off and on over the course of 35 years. The resulting 50-minute work was completed in 1994. Brant explained his intent was “to create a symphonic idiom which would ride in the orchestra with athletic sure-footedness and present Ives’s music in clear, vivid and intense sonorities.” Brant’s transcription is masterful and highly imaginative. He freely shifts the contours of melodic lines from one register to another and occasionally constructs inner voices to enhance his orchestral palette while remaining true to the content of Ives’s original piano score which, with its multiple staves, extreme density and general absence of time signatures, clearly suggests a blueprint in the form of an orchestral short score. The result could hardly be in more capable hands than those of Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony, both of whom have an outstanding record of support for contemporary American music.
The disc also includes Aaron Copland’s Organ Symphony of 1925, a work commissioned and first performed by his mentor Nadia Boulanger. It is a remarkably assured accomplishment by the then 24-year-old composer and was the first of his works to receive wide public acclaim. Organist Paul Jacobs delivers a knockout performance of this intriguing and surprisingly intimate work. Superlative SACD quality sound throughout makes this disc a must-have item.
