DVOŘÁK’S PROPHECY - A New Narrative for American Classical Music

Film 2: Charles Ives’ America

Written and produced by Joseph Horowitz
Visual presentation by Peter Bogdanoff

Steeped in nostalgia, in his Danbury childhood and the New England Transcendentalists with whom he profoundly identified, in the American experience of race which he absorbed from his Abolitionist grandparents, Ives used the past with consummate empathy and brave artistry. A musical Whitman or Melville, he embodies the American trope of the ‘self-made genius’, heeding Emerson’s call to cut the cultural umbilical cord with Europe, forging an original path. The music at hand here includes his Second Symphony (a milestone in culling the vernacular to set beside Huckleberry Finn), The Housatonic at Stockbridge (possibly the most sublime nature reverie in the American orchestral repertoire), and The St Gaudens in Boston Common (a singular ghost dirge in tribute to Colonel Robert Gould Shaw’s Black Civil War regiment). We also hear portions of Ives’s Concord Sonata performed by Steven Mayer (an interpretation seasoned by a lifetime of advocacy) and half a dozen Ives songs peerlessly sung (in live performance with Paul Sanchez) by William Sharp. The commentators include the Ives scholars J. Peter Burkholder and Judith Tick, and the conductor James Sinclair. – J.H.

Music:
Charles Ives

with
William Sharp
Steven Mayer
Paul Sanchez
James Sinclair
Kenneth Schermerhorn
J. Peter Burkholder
Joseph Horowitz
Judith Tick

Picture format: NTSC 16:9
Sound format: PCM Stereo
Region code: 0 (worldwide)
Audio language: English
Running time: 84 mins
No. of DVDs: 1 (DVD 9)