Robert Clements replies to me:

>I'll play advocate's devil on this one; & say that i actually consider
>the Ives' performances on this set (not the Ruggles or the Seeger, which
>respond perfectly to von Dohnanyi & the Clevelanders' approach) to be
>conceptually poor; ...
>
>... where most performances - for a mixture of technical or artistic
>reasons - end up with a surging wash of sound from which the great
>tub-thumbing hymn emerges as the one big unifying voice.  I truly believe
>that this was the effect that Ives was searching for; not the sound of the
>music which he physically wrote. ...
>
>that's all this recording gives you: a pitiless web of individual voices,
>each as expertly delineated as they are (to my ears, at least) irrelevantly
>clear, within which the hymn is just a single strand...  the result is a
>weaker overall impact from the big finale; & - i strongly suspect - a
>distinct miscommunication of Ives's transcendental popularist intention.
>
>Similar problems of gratuitous clarity within the orchestral texture
>mark/mar (depending on your perspective) the other five movements; with
>the classic _Putnam's Camp, Redding, Connecticut_ particularly feeling ...

I have no wish to argue Robert out of his ideas, but he does indeed raise
interesting points.  What I get out of Dohnanyi's performances is a new way
of playing Ives, and I like it.  Ives becomes less the bumptious amateur
and far more aware of his technique.  I must admit that I do like other
approaches, including the more traditionally Romantic Hanson, Ormandy,
Bernstein, and Zinman, but they're really of a piece.

Dohnanyi's great virtue, it seems to me, has always been that he rethinks
the works he does "from scratch," and he's such a great musician that it
works a great deal of the time, as I think it does in this case.  I *do*
get from Dohnanyi's performances the emotional affect Robert describes.
There have been howlingly bad recordings from Dohnanyi - I think of the
woebegone Symphonie fantastique and the totally clueless Pictures at an
Exhibition - but one thing I've never accused him of is "pulling a Boulez."
In other words, I've never been indifferent to a Dohnanyi recording.

Furthermore, I think the individual nature of Ives's music comes through.
It *doesn't* sound like either Ruggles or Seeger.  So I deny whatever
implications Robert has made of a homogeneous approach.  The problem is,
it seems to me, that to Robert the Ives an sich is missing.  I've no
quarrel with that, really.  After all, I complain regularly about Karajan's
Beethoven for the same reason.  However, I don't see a inconsistency with
Ives as He Really Is and do get quite a bit of illumination from Dohnanyi's
approach to Ives.  In short, I think Ives is a great composer whose music
can take many different approaches - something Ives himself encouraged.
interestingly, it seems that we're just now getting over worrying about
the notes, so that different approaches can be tried.

As to "gratuitous clarity," I don't know what to make of that.  For my
money, you can't be too clear, but that may be my Midwestern thriftiness
coming through:  I've *paid* for all those lines, damnit!  I want to hear
them.

Steve Schwartz