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        • Charles Ives

        • Emerson Concerto (1998)

        • Associated Music Publishers Inc (World)


        reconstruction by David G. Porter

        • 2+pic.0.2.2+cbn/2231/bells[=cel]/str
        • Piano
        • 20 min

        Programme Note

        The Emerson Overture for Piano and Orchestra (S. 22), also referred to by Ives as "Emerson Concerto," is part of Ives's "Set of Overtures: Men of Literature" which Ives sought to complete (including the completed Robert Browning Overture, the well-developed draft of Emerson Overture, the partially sketched Matthew Arnold Overture, and the projected or lost Alcott Overture, Walt Whitman Overture, Whittier Overture, and Henry Ward Beecher Overture). Ives sketched the Emerson Overture/Concerto in 1910-11. At one point there was another piano concerto similarly composed as a portrait of Nathaniel Hawthorne, but that concerto became a movement of Ives's "Concord" Sonata and then the second movement of Symphony No. 4.

        In his Essay Before a Sonata, Ives wrote about his conception of Emerson, the philosopher: "Emerson is...America's deepest explorer of the spiritual immensities...perceiving from this inward source alone that 'every ultimate fact is only the first of a new series'...We see him--a mountain-guide so intensely on the lookout for the trail of his star that he has no time to stop and retrace his footprints." 

        Biographer Jan Swafford writes: "Here Ives hints at the meaning, atmosphere, and method of the Emerson pieces. All of them are craggy, dissonant, searching...The dramatic layout of the [Emerson Concerto] recalls "heroic" nineteenth-century concerto; the soloist represents Emerson, the orchestra the world confronting him.

        This is a radical work, the most dissonant language Ives ever created. Emerson, the essayist, is challenging and Ives felt this musical representation must be so, but there is also beauty here inspired by Emerson, the poet.

        Ives left nearly two dozen pages of musical manuscripts for this work, some of it fully scored. David G. Porter did a masterful job of pulling together a performable edition.

        - James Sinclair

        Media

        Features

        • Celebrating Charles Ives at 150
          • Celebrating Charles Ives at 150
          • Associated Music Publishers and the Wise Music Group is pleased to celebrate the 150th birthday year of composer Charles Ives.

        Reviews

        The Philharmonia under Christoph von Dohnányi unveiled a real curiosity, the EMERSON CONCERTO for piano and orchestra which Charles Ives began in 1907 but left incomplete, despite coming back to it on and off for about 40 years. Ives's scores are notoriously difficult to decipher. But David Porter's reconstruction finds a way through the morass of material, and has breathed life into a piece that is typically robust and uncompromising. The revived concerto is not long, but it is weighty in pronouncement. Its underlying temperament is Romantic, with some striving themes, a surging impetus and passages of rich, visionary beauty. But the music resolutely turns its back on the 19th century in its wild dissonances, its acerbic tumult and its clashes of conflicting ideas. Ives intended the concerto as a homage to the 19th-century American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson. Indeed, Ives's forthright individuality as a composer could be regarded as a paradigm of Emerson's doctrine of self-reliance.
        Geoffrey Norris, The Daily Telegraph (London)
        The major event of the night was the world premiere ofCharles Ives' "Emerson Concerto," for piano and orchestra, a work that melds numerous sources into a three-movement reconstruction by David G. Porter. Ives [was] a radical who stretched the bounds of the sonic art in his time [and] sounded as audacious and feisty as ever in performance by the Cleveland Orchestra under music director Christoph van Dohnányi. With [numerous] roots in other Ives pieces, the concerto's materials come from such scores as the "Concord Sonata" for piano and other keyboard works that showed Ives to be a prime exponent of the avant-garde of the early decades of the 20th century. This piece is also an example of the composer gazing in every direction, looking forward where no other creative artist had gone and casting a nostalgic ear toward the core of his musical experience. Among the influences is Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Along with such quotations are hints of tunes or sounds Ives knew when he was growing up. There are chimes to evoke the church landscapes of his Connecticut youth, wisps of delicate ideas reflecting the tender, even shy side of his nature, and massive blocks of sound layered on top of one another. The piece begins with a densely packed opening movement in which the pianist often assumes a fierce role, lavishing cluster upon cluster and rugged patterns that could depict Ives as a bold naturalist. As the work unfolds, the music becomes contemplative, embracing lyrical utterances of winsome beauty. More cataclysmic notions are in store in the third movement, a typical soundscape of unpredictable Ivesian structures and expressive discourse. [With its] inner energy [and] myriad qualities, the effect of the work is startling, sometimes elusive and always arresting.
        Donald Rosenberg, Cleveland Plain Dealer
        It's time to celebrate...This 25-minute concerto is a four-movement work in which virtuosic solo part and accompaniment work both together and against each other...each movement is a continual development of materials. There are ravishing extended solo passages. The orchestral realization is also convincingly Ivesian, looking both back to his SECOND SYMPHONY and forward to the FOURTH. The movements are [sometimes] loud and aggressive, others are more ethereal, leading to a peaceful close. The pairing of piano and orchestra seems entirely suitable for Ives, and this realization of the Emerson Concerto is a major addition to the Ives performing canon. Naxos's recorded sound is honest and natural...the EMERSON CONCERTO must be heard.
        James H. North, Fanfare
        Ives was much taken with Emerson and wanted to create music that he thought would convey in sound the integrity and transcendence of Emerson's thought. The EMERSON CONCERTO is a reconstruction [and] what has emerged here is a 25-minute densely layered creation for piano and orchestra. This is a piece of grandeur and mystery, fascinating to hear over and over, as more of its mysteries resolve themselves or recreate themselves when a coherence you thought was there turned out on closer listening not to be.
        Stephen D. Chakwin, Jr., American Record Guide

        Discography

        Title Unavailable
        • Label
          Naxos
        • Catalogue Number
          8.559175
        • Conductor
          James Sinclair
        • Ensemble
          National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland
        • Soloist
          Alan Feinberg (Piano)