DISCOVERIES | RECORDINGS REVIEWEDBruce SurteesI’m writing this the day after saying a fond farewell to a belovedcolleague in the company of his family and a large cohort of friendsfrom the music community. Bruce Surtees, best known in these pagesfor his contributions over two decades in the form of his column OldWine in New Bottles, died peacefully on December 28 surrounded byfamily at Humber River Hospital after a brief illness.Bruce’s legacy began in 1961 when he and his wife Vivienne openedThe Book Cellar in the basement of a music store on Yonge Street, ashop that would become a mainstay of Toronto’s literary industry forthe next three decades. The store moved several times, eventually toits flagship location (there were several subsidiaries) across from theFour Seasons Hotel in Yorkville. With the bookstore thriving, Brucebranched out to embrace his first love, music, opening The ClassicalRecord Shop, as the first tenant and cornerstone of the tony HazeltonLanes complex.Bruce and I first crossed paths during my tenure at CJRT-FM in themid-1990s where he was the co-host of Records in Review, first withthe station’s music director, conductor Paul Robinson, and later withToronto Star music critic William Littler. But it was not until I invitedhim to become part of the review team here that I really got to knowBruce. In July 2001, for the inauguration of the DISCoveries section,he wrote his first review for us under the banner “Worth Repeating:Older Recordings Worthy of Note,” writing about one of his favouritepieces, Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder, in an EMI reissue with the DanishRadio Symphony Orchestra and Chorus conducted by Janos Ferencsik.Some 75 stand-alone reviews followed over the next four years.April 2005 marked the beginning of a new chapter, when his OldWine column became a monthly feature in the magazine. By the timeof his final column in October 2023 Bruce had brought more than adozen historic performances of Gurrelieder to our attention, alongwith countless opera sets, symphonic cycles and lieder recitals—nighon 1,000 reviews, in many cases involving multiple discs.I don’t know how he found the time to listen to it all, butlisten he did.Over the course of the last two decades, Bruce and his familybecame very special friends to my wife Sharon and me, as theyattended chamber recitals by amateur groups I played cello in, underthe auspices of University Settlement Music and Arts School, andjoined us for musical gatherings in our backyard. One treasuredmemory is learning Taylor Swift’s Safe and Sound on my guitar inorder to accompany Bruce’s granddaughter Alexis, but there are somany memories of Bruce and “his girls” that I will cherish forever.Especially the visits to Baycrest where his caregivers took such goodcare of Bruce over the past year (thank you Christine and Kristine!)making him comfortable and making us feel welcome. Bruce myfriend, we miss you so.Ives at 1512024 marked both the sesquicentennial of the birth of Charles Ives in1874, and 70 years since his death at the age of 80. I’ve spent the lastmonth immersed in a set that would in happier days have fallen intothe purview of Bruce Surtees’ Old Wine in New Bottles – although inthis particular case perhaps Old Wine in OldBottles would be more apt.I say that because Charles Ives: TheRCA and Columbia Album Anthology –Recordings for the Analog Era 1945-76(Sony Classical 19658885962 amazon.ca/Charles-Ives-Columbia-Album-Anthology/dp/B0DBP3VXTH) is a 22-CD boxed setthat consists of reissues of more than 30DAVID OLDSvinyl records packaged in miniature reproductions of the original LPjackets. Although the booklet includes recording details and releasedates for all the pieces and has a five-page introductory essay by KevinSherwin, the only actual program notes are those printed on thoseoriginal LP covers which are reduced to a size nearly impossible toread even with a strong magnifying glass. And in cases where a CDcontains material from more than one LP, only one cover is included,leaving some works with no notes at all. So, there’s my quibble outof the way right from the start. Other than that, I find it a marvellouscollection. It spans three decades of recordings during which time Iveswent from being perceived as an esoteric crackpot with his integrationof marching band themes, popular tunes and hymns into his erstwhile“classical” compositions, to being a revered visionary, the epitome ofthe American composer.I wrote last month about Ives’ Piano Sonata No.2 “Concord, Mass.1840-1860” and its first champion John Kirkpatrick. Disc Onecontains Kirkpatrick’s historic 1948 recording of the sonata (made11 years after he had given its first public performance), along witha brief movement from the first sonata. Disc Two features WilliamMasselos’ 1951 78rpm recording of Piano Sonata No.1 which appearedon LP in 1953 (reissued in 1961). For comparison of the approachesand developments in understanding these extremely complicatedworks by the two performers over the period of two decades, Disc 8presents Masselos’ 1967 revisiting of the first sonata and Disc 13 givesKirkpatrick’s 1968 second recording of the “Concord.” Masselos’1951 recording is accompanied by Patricia Travers, and the disc alsoincludes Otto Herz’s 10” recording of the Sonata for Violin and PianoNo.2 from the same year. I’ll mention that this is the only one of Ives’four violin sonatas included in this mostly comprehensive collection(Tone Roads No.1 is also conspicuous by its absence).That being said, there is a CD (Disc 16) of chamber music thatincludes a piano trio, A Set of Three Short Pieces for string quartet,four diverse pieces for piano quintet, his Largo for Violin, Clarinetand Piano, and another largo for violin and piano. The two numbered50 | February & March 2025 thewholenote.com
string quartets appear on Disc 10 performed by the Juilliard Quartet(1967), with the second of the two reappearing on the final collection’sfinal CD, performed by the Cleveland Quartet (1976), pairedwith Samuel Barber’s String Quartet in B Minor with its iconic moltoadagio second movement.Ives’ vocal music is amply represented with a CD of songs (Disc 17)sung by soprano Evelyn Lear and baritone Thomas Stewart, and Disc 7features choral works performed by the Gregg Smith Singers and theColumbia Chamber Orchestra, among others; a highlight of the discfor me is General William Booth Enters into Heaven featuring thegorgeous bass voice of Archie Drake. There is also a disc (18) of “OldSongs Deranged” which comprises familiar tunes refashioned fortheatre orchestra with Ives’ usual cryptic wit. There are four recordingsof Variations on “America” (same tune as God Save the King),one in the organ version with E. Power Biggs, and William Schuman’sarrangement for orchestra conducted by Morton Gould (1966), EugeneOrmandy (1969) and André Kostelanetz (1976).The bulk of the set, though, is devoted to Ives’ original music fororchestra. Ives wrote four numbered symphonies and another entitledA Symphony: New England Holidays. He also wrote three orchestral“sets” (the first of which is subtitled Three Places in New England),the surprisingly boisterous Robert Browning Overture, the mostlysubdued and at times ghostly Central Park in the Dark, and TheUnanswered Question, as well as a number of smaller works. Someof these orchestral works also include choral movements (SymphonyNo.4, Orchestral Set No.2, A Symphony: New England Holidays) andmost of the pieces appear in multiple performances. Most notableamong these are the Symphony No.4 in a 1968 performance underthe baton of Leopold Stokowski with assistants José Serebrier andDavid Katz (because Stokowski felt it too difficult for one conductor torealize) and one from 1974 with Serebrier alone at the podium. Alsonotable: Symphony No.2 conducted by Leonard Bernstein in 1960 andEugene Ormandy in 1974. The Bernstein recording is supplementedwith a lecture by the maestro extolling the virtues (and difficulties) ofIves’ music.I must say that listening to 25 hours of the quirky music of Ives isdaunting and not for the faint of heart. To paraphrase the sometimescantankerouscomposer you need to be able to “stand up and takeyour dissonance like a man.” An invaluable tool I found forapproaching the task is a book that was published in 2021, Listeningto Charles Ives: Variations on his America by past president of theCharles Ives Society J. Peter Burkholder (Amadeus Press charlesives.org/listening-charles-ives-variations-his-america). It’s a marvellousresource, especially when read in conjunction with the listening toolson the Charles Ives Society website (charlesives.org). My only frustrationcame when I could find neither Piano Sonata No.1 norSymphony No.4 in the detailed discussion of Ives’ works.The same year that Burkholder publishedhis book, the current president of the IvesSociety Donald Berman published CharlesE. Ives: Piano Studies - Shorter Works forPiano, Volume 2 - Ives Society CriticalEdition (Peermusic Classical), and in 2024Berman released what may be, thus far, thedefinitive recording of the “Concord” Sonata,Charles Ives - Sonata No.2; The St. Gaudens(Avie Records AV2678 avie-records.com/releases/ives-piano-sonata-no-2-concord-mass-1940-1860-•-the-stgaudens-black-march).I say”thus far” because it is likely there will never be such a thingas definitive where Concord is concerned. As I said in last month’scolumn, Ives continued to revise the work until 1947 when hepublished a supposedly definitive second edition after a decade ofcollaboration with John Kirkpatrick who had given the first publicperformance of the complete sonata in 1937 and would go on torecord it in 1948. But the evolution of the sonata did not stop there,with scholars like Kirkpatrick and later Jay Gottlieb continuing tomake “improvements” based on Ives’ innumerable sketches and notebooks.With the resources of the Charles Ives Society at his disposal,Berman has been able to draw on most of a century’s scholarship tofoster his understanding of the iconic work and the result is stunning.He has chosen to pair the sonata with The St. Gaudens which issubtitled “Black March.” The music depicts marching soldiers of theMassachusetts 54 th , one of the first Union armies of African Americansduring the Civil War and one that suffered heavy casualties. In anannotation to the score Ives pays tribute to the regiment and says“Your country was made from you – images of a divine law carved inthe shadow of a saddened heart.” Berman offers it as a prelude to theConcord, and it is an effective set-up for an outstanding disc.And these just inIn September 2007 I reviewed composer/pianist Frank Horvat’s firstCD and said his “compositions are diverse enough that it’s hard todescribe exactly what the disc is about. Sometimes bordering on theimprovisations of Keith Jarrett (but without the audible humming), atmoments reminiscent of boogie-woogie, at others dark ballad-likemusings and occasional fugal passages, this is truly an eclectic mix.”Over almost two decades since then, with 22 releases in his discography(16 of which have been reviewed in DISCoveries), Horvat haspersisted in his eclecticism and is still hard to pin down.His latest release, More Rivers (navonarecords.com/catalog/nv6689),explores yetanother side of his creativity in a tribute toAnn Southam inspired by her ebullient androllicking series Rivers. Southam’s frequentcollaborator Christina Petrowska Quilicois the pianist here, as she was so often forSoutham’s pieces. Her discography, whichnumbers more than six dozen releases,includes Southam’s Rivers, Pond Life, GlassHouses, Glass Houses Revisited and Soundspinning, a collection ofearly works including my introduction to Southam’s music, Three inBlue, which was included in the Royal Conservatory of Music syllabuswhen I was studying piano more than half a century ago.Horvat says that although “Southam’s work in the area ofminimalist composition has been a big influence on my life […] MoreRivers is not intended to be a sequel or continuation of Rivers, but myhope is that my own unique musical minimalist voice will be a tributeto this body of work that has impacted me so profoundly.” The setcomprises seven pieces constructed with overlapping looping texturesevoking water; murmuring, babbling, racing or gently flowing. Anumber of the movements are calm and meditative, reflecting in thecomposer’s words “a spiritual sentiment,” but there are also dynamicand forceful moments reminding us of the power of water. PetrowskaQuilico rises to all the challenges, making even the most intricatepassages sound effortless and natural.In his programme note Horvat implores us to remember “Water isthewholenote.com/listeningAdjacenceDaniel LippelCompilation of chamber worksfeaturing guitar recorded withvarious collaborators (ICE, counter)induction, Flexible Music, etc..) thatintegrate varied aesthetics into oneprogrammatic arc.One: New Music forUnaccompanied ViolinPatrick YimYim plays with virtuosity andpowerful expression throughout,convincingly framing these newpieces within the strong lineage ofthe music that has come before themthewholenote.com February & March 2025 | 51
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