Decoration Day Music

Part of my ritual on certain holidays is to play music appropriate to the day, and each year on Memorial Day I try to take time to play "Decoration Day" by Charles Ives.  (Decoration Day is what this holiday was called during the post-Civil War era.)  Ives wrote this tone poem to describe a typical late 19th century Decoration Day observance: the hymn service in the church, the slow march to the cemetery, where taps would sound on the trumpet as the war veterans wept, and then a quick-step march back to town accompanied by the village band.  When I was first getting to know Ives's Holidays Symphonies back in the 1960s with the old Vox-Turnabout recording by Donald Johanos and the Dallas Symphony, this was the movement that first got my emotions up.  I would have a lump in my throat as the distant trumpet sounded taps, and would then be thrilled by the rousing brass band music.

Over the years, various newer recordings supplanted the Johanos effort in my esteem, and in recent years it has been David Zinman with the Baltimore Symphony that has been my mainstay. But this year I tried out the new recording by James Sinclair and the Malmo (Sweden) Symphony - and it's a winner.  This is the first one I've heard that seems to put that brass band in the proper context.  In earlier recordings, the brass band at the end overwhelms all the accompanying music.  Thrilling as it is, it seems not to be the effect Ives was striving for.  Sinclair embeds the brass band in the surrounding context, so one hears as well the noises of the crowd mingling with the band as everybody bustles back to town after the graveyard ceremony.  This seems more authentically Ivesian to me.  I have Sinclair's edition of the score for the Charles Ives Society, and the dynamic markings bear out his approach.  Of course, this edition had to be constructed from the sometimes inscrutable manuscripts of the composer.  Are the dynamics Ives's or Sinclair's?  The effect seems so true -- shades of the 4th Symphony's second movement, for example -- that I feel as if this must be what Ives wanted.

The rest of this disc is also stunningly interesting.  4th of July is not as zippy as the old Bernstein New York Philharmonic recording, but has plenty of energy to it, nonetheless, and the performance of Thanksgiving is first-class.  What gives the recording an extra edge are some first recorded performances of materials reconstructed from the composer's manuscripts, including a student Overture, another pictorial tone-poem "The General Slocum" describing the wreck of a pleasure craft, the Postlude in F, and the Yale-Princeton Football game "take-off."

The Malmo Symphony plays like champions, and the local chamber chorus sings with fervor in the Thanksgiving finale.  This is a real Naxos bargain.