Ives: Symphony No. 2, Central Park in the Dark & The Unanswered Question

Charles Ives wrote his Second Symphony between 1897 and 1901, but its first performance took place half a century later, given by Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic on 22 February 1951. The score, published the same year, includes a preface by Henry Cowell which declares that Ives is Americas greatest musical pioneer. He was the first American … driven to invention because nothing at hand expressed the sound-experiences which he received from the world around him. Ives was still a student at Yale (where his composition teacher was Horatio Parker) when he started the Second Symphony and he had embarked on his successful insurance career by the time he finished it. Its origins are complex: according to James B. Sinclairs Descriptive Catalogue of the Music of Charles Ives, portions of all five movements were derived from earlier, mostly lost, works, and it includes a web of references and allusions to familiar tunes such as Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean and Camptown Races, and also the classics, including Brahms First Symphony, which served as a kind of model for the entire work.

Cast in five movements, the symphony opens with lyrical material that is given strength by Ivess contrapuntal writing and made utterly individual by quotations such as the appearance mid-way through the movement of Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean on horns. After the string-dominated textures of the first movement, the second opens with fresh, bright woodwinds: a complete change in colour and mood that seems to symbolize a transition from the Old World to the New. The opening bars of the Adagio cantabile are full of harmonic shifts giving a hint of the mobility of Ivess later music. Ives called this movement a take-off of organ and choir music, but the element of parody does nothing to diminish its beauty. It ends with a quotation from the opening of Beethovens Fifth Symphony played pianissimo by a horn, over which a still more distant echo of America the Beautiful is heard on a flute. A solemn Lento maestoso occupies a similar position to the equivalent movement in Schumanns Rhenish Symphony, and shares something of its gravity and contrapuntal severity. The finale is a breezy Allegro molto vivace, bristling with a kind of collage of familiar tunes. The final chord was apparently added by Ives when the work was being prepared for publication, and Bernstein has incurred the wrath of some Ives scholars by elongating this splendidly outrageous dissonance, as he does on the present recording.