Ives Got Music, Who Can Ask for Anything More?

Not that we're purist for the original period sound--just curious. The rest of the performance was dedicated to Ives. Alex Ross explained to us in his book the place that Charles Ives holds within the vast American music landscape. Basically, Ives tried to make a living as an organist and composer, and at some point realized that he would be better off working in the insurance business and composing in his spare time. He was good at that insurance thing, made enough money doing such dry work, and yet still composed some funky-ass music.

MTT and the symphony recorded the performances for the next installment of Keeping Score, an excellent TV show. We adore that series and the associated website, and we're so psyched they're coming up with three more episodes: Ives, Berlioz, and Shostakovich (to be aired in 2009.)

The point of the show is to spell things out in the DVDs so that even we can get it; so we first had 5 hymns and songs sung by the SF Symphony Chorus, which would reappear in some form or other in the Ives' New England Holidays Symphony. The traditional "Good Night, Ladies" had the lyrics "Merrily we roll around, roll around, roll around" set to the music of "Mary had a little lamb," except that it must be the other way around. We totally support the need for underlying that particular quote in the Ives: it's just plain goofy to have nursery rhymes sung with total seriousness by a chorus in dress up garb, to a captivated audience. If John Cage had done this, people would get offended, or fascinated, everyone would have an opinion. But here it was done squarely, with no subversive intent, and no one seemed to care about the irony.

There was fun to be had nonetheless: the Holidays symphony is as humorous and as exuberant as it gets. We were thinking of Darius Milhaud (maybe not the best way to explain Ives by comparing to someone with about the same level of obscure-ness) for the collage nature of the pieces, borrowing those songs and putting them together in a playful patchwork.

The Fourth of July holiday, in particular, gets mad-crazy. MTT introduced three out of the four holidays by reading some text from Ives, with Independence Day-ish descriptions of parades, baseball games, and other Americana or yore. Also, at some point James Gaffigan appeared out of nowhere to conduct half of the orchestra asynchronously from MTT, resulting in decent organized chaos. Pretty rad sounding, we must admit.

The symphony will record the Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique in a couple weeks for the Keeping Score series, and we're all for these concerts with tight music with the extra explanatory frills.