In 1951, Leonard Bernstein, age 32, led the New York Philharmonic in the belated world premiere of Charles Ives’ Symphony No. 2 – music composed half a century earlier. The performance was nationally broadcast and widely noticed. Seven years after that, Bernstein began his tenure as the Philharmonic’s music director with Ives’ Second Symphony. In all, he performed Ives’ … [Read more...] about The Bernstein Story Not Told in “Maestro” — Take Four: What Happened to Charles Ives?
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Mahler, New York, and Cultural Memory
“It is always instructive to read European newspapers on American affairs. It gives us the much needed opportunity to see ourselves as others see us – with their eyes shut. . . Do we not all reek with malodorous lucre? Are we not a nation of tradesmen?”? Thus W. J. Henderson, in the New York Sun (March 8, 1908), on the arrival of Gustav Mahler in New … [Read more...] about Mahler, New York, and Cultural Memory
When Charles Ives Wrote a Song as Magnificent as Brahms’s
In the remarkable absence of any suitable acknowledgement of the Charles Ives Sesquicentenary by our nation's slumbering orchestras, it has fallen to the National Endowment for the Humanities to celebrate the 150th birthday of America's greatest creative genius in the realm of classical music. In its latest embodiment, the NEH Music Unwound consortium, which I have directed … [Read more...] about When Charles Ives Wrote a Song as Magnificent as Brahms’s
Yet Again — The South Dakota Symphony
As readers of this blog now know by heart, I regard the South Dakota Symphony as a national exemplar. I’ve written about their Lakota Music Project, which connects the orchestra to Indian reservations throughout the state. I’ve extolled their ingeniously contextualized performances of Silvestre Revueltas’s Redes, of Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony, … [Read more...] about Yet Again — The South Dakota Symphony
Celebrating the Ives Sesquicentenary: An American Landmark
The upcoming Sesquicentenary of Charles Ives (1874-1954) is a landmark moment in American cultural history. Not only is he the towering creative genius of American classical music; he links to the highest American cultural pantheon, resonating in countless ways with the likes of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, and Herman Melville (connections I explore in my … [Read more...] about Celebrating the Ives Sesquicentenary: An American Landmark