Ives "Three Places in New England" - Boulez / Cleveland Orchestra (1970)

[@othermirth1866]

I love this piece - “are my ears on wrong?”

[@christinebeckett5511]

Boulez and Cleveland--unbeatable. Love the sudden contrasts. Live performance too--when? where?

[@Twentythousandlps]

Boulez stated that Ives was very interesting for his forward-looking elements, but thought his music was marred by amateurism. His idea of a really important American composer was Ives' friend Elliott Carter.

[@mmorseca]

Boy, is this ever NOT how to conduct this music! Rushed, disconnected, suspicious..

[@brentmarquez4157]

Agree, as much as I love Boulez and Cleveland, Boulez as we all know was not much for nostalgia, which is of course what a lot of Ives' music is about.

[@mmorseca]

It's strange. PB was always a man of, to put it mildly, strongly drawn tastes. By this point point, he could certainly have declined to conduct this work. Given his audible lack of sympathy for it, why on earth did he bother? Was this some aftershock of his ferocious hatred for bourgeois music taste, that impelled him, e.g., to conduct Wagner without any emotion?

[@brentmarquez4157]

@@mmorseca My guess is that, like with Mahler, Wagner and Brahms, he appreciated forward looking composers and sort of paid homage to them by conducting performances of their work. Of course he conducted Mahler as if it were Berg, and I believe he conducted Ives as if he were some other modern composer (since Ives anticipated polytonality, polyrhythmic writing, tone clusters and the regular use of dissonance decades before it became hip). I'm reading Jan Swaffords biography on Ives now and it's really touching and insightful how Ives really wrote about foggy memories of the good old days (including wild recollections), so it makes sense that Boulez' presentation of the work as a forward looking prophetic musical document just doesn't work. I think he just wanted to pay tribute to a fellow innovator and musical original and interpreted 3 places like he interprets other dead composers' works: as if they were written for our(modern) time or highlighting aspects of the work as if they were the related present day works inspired by them.

[@mmorseca]

There are musicians whose "sentimentality"--nostalgic affection for and appreciation of the past in general and "mass cultural" music such as hymns and parlour songs--is fundamental to their musical personality and conception. The symphonies of both Ives and Mahler make it clear how deeply they were such people. Boulez, maturing in the traumatic cauldron of the war, in which the maudlin, amoral nonsense of Nazism was legitimating violence on an unimaginable scale, was understandably horrified by sentimentality. (I'm not practicing cheap psychology here; Boulez was far from alone in this disposition.) But that outlook puts him irreconcilable poles apart from these predecessors. His Mahler conducting has many admirers. But, as even with Berg--likewise a notably sentimental soul--Boulez sounds to me like he's conducting these folks with his fingers crossed..

[@muslit]

@@mmorseca What did he conduct with emotion?