Terrific Ives Song Recital on New World Records from Susan Narucki and Donald Berman

There is a wonderful new recital of songs by Charles Ives on the New World Records label, performed by soprano Susan Narucki and Donald Berman.  This is done the way such productions should be done: The booklet has a lengthy, thoughtful and insightful note about Ives's songs, full texts are given (with translations, if needed), sheet music sources for the songs are identified, a bibliography is included -- and, most importantly, the performances are superb and superbly recorded.

Earlier this year I gave a rather tepid reception to the first CD of a projected five in a project to record the complete songs of Charles Ives on the Naxos label.  This project has been completed, and I've found that the following discs were all generally better than the first.  A rather large group of singers, pianists and others (contributing instrumental obligatti when called for by the composer) were assembled for the project, which emanated from New Haven, many of those involved having apparently some connection with Yale University, Ives's alma mater and the repository of many of his papers, although I don't think this was an official project of the Yale music department.  At any event, it turns out to have been a useful exercise, as there is now an inexpensive source of recordings for all of Ives's songs, and finding a particular song is easy because they were released in alphabetical order by title.  But listening through any single disc can be a bit of a chore, because alphabetical order does not necessarily yield an interesting sequence in terms of a musical experience, and because the singers and pianists vary in terms of the persuasiveness with which they perform the material.

By contrast, the Narucki/Berman recital presents Ives songs in an excellent context, as they have put together a sequence that works as a program.  Ms. Narucki is an excellent Ives singer, with spot-on intonation and pronunciation of text, and real insight into phrasing and dynamics resulting in a very convincing musical presentation.  Berman meets the virtuosic demands of Ives's idiosyncratic piano writing in high style, showing great sensitivity to nuance that is lost in some other recordings of this repertory.  I can't recommend this one highly enough, especially to anybody unfamiliar with Ives's songs who is interesting in beginning to explore the repertory.  The Naxos series may be inexpensive, but they will not provide a good introduction because the quality of Ives's song output (almost 200 in all) varies.  Narucki and Berman have selected a sequence of excellent songs here, and have rendered them to the highest musical standard.  Hurrah!

Comments

[Gene Halaburt]

How do you feel the Naxos series compares with the Troy-Albany series?

[Gene Halaburt]

How do you feel the Narucki/Berman performances compare with those on the Troy/Albany complete, the Boatwright/Kirkpatrick, Ramey/Jones, Lear/Stewart/Mandel, DeGaetani/Kalish. Alexander/Krone. Curry/Vosgerchain, Finley/Drake, Puffer/Tenney or the Nixon/McCabe recordings?

[Art Leonard]

I haven't done any systematic comparisons, and it's been a long time since I've listened to many of these, but my overall impression has been that Ives song performance quality has improved consistently over time as his idiom has become more familiar for performers and as the piano parts have become easier for the accompanists to master.

This was brought home to me when the Marni Nixon recordings with John McCabe from the old Nonesuch recording were reissued on an EMI compilation. I remembered those recordings fondly, but they didn't sound as good to me now in light of the more recent work.

I think that for somebody who wants to acquire the "complete" Ives song repertory, the Albany/Troy series, despite leaving out a handful of more recently discovered songs, is marginally better in quality than the Naxos series. Albany/Troy uses chronological order, while Naxos uses alphabetical order, so there is no easy way to mix and match the two. Anybody who is a true Ives song fanatic will want them both.

I think Narucki is among the best of the recent single-disc Ives recitals. I appreciated the two Finley/Drake recitals on Hyperion, but somehow the performances did not always feel idiomatic to me; I wanted a sharper rhythmic profile at times.

I wish Thomas Hampson would record more Ives songs. He sings a few numbers on a Tilson-Thomas/SFSO Ives disc, and there is an old recital that focused on the German songs, and a few individual songs show up on other programs, but an entire Ives song disc from him would be a real blessing.