The works on this recording focus on a singular genre created by a singular composer. The kind of piece Charles Ives called a ‘set’ is usually a larger work made by putting together independently-written smaller pieces. The First Orchestral Set, variously titled Three Places in New England and A New England Symphony, is one of Ives’s great tributes to his roots. Put together around 1913-14 from material going back years, it is typically Ivesian in that each movement has an underlying program. Like the other sets, the Second has a slow-fast-slow pattern and a visionary hymn-based finale. The unfinished Third Orchestral Set was the only set Ives planned as a whole from the beginning. It may stand as the most profound discovery of the many and ongoing efforts to reconstruct Ives’s incomplete works. This is its first complete performance and recording.
Orchestral Set No. 1, "3 Places in New England" (version 1, ed. J.B. Sinclair)
1 I. The St Gaudens in Boston Common (Col. Shaw and his Colored Regiment) 08:55
2 II. Putnam's Camp, Redding, Connecticut 05:15
3 III. The Housatonic at Stockbridge 03:57
Ives, Charles
Mass Text - Lyricist
Orchestral Set No. 2
4 I. An Elegy to Our Forefathers 04:34
5 II. The Rockstrewn Hills Join in the People's Outdoor Meeting 04:59
6 III. From Hanover Square North, at the End of a Tragic Day, the Voice of the People Again Arose 06:16
Ives, Charles
Orchestral Set No. 3
7 I. —: Andante moderato (ed. D.G. Porter) 06:12
8 II. An Afternoon, or During Camp Meetin' Week - One Secular Afternoon (in Bethel) (ed. D.G. Porter) 09:46
9 III. —: Andante (realised by N. Josephson) 12:42
