Opera review: The Ives Project – New Camerata Opera
“You cannot set art off in a corner and hope for it to have vitality, reality, and substance.” So said Charles Ives, 1874 -1954, the – in my judgement – founding father of modernist 20thcentury American classical music.
Bravo to New Camerata, the innovative New York opera company who on Thursday took Ives at his word. The company brought his neglected songbook from that corner, and plonked it centre stage in their first complete presentation of The Ives Project; a filmography comprising a representative selection from the composer’s 144 songs, three years in the making.
Reaction’s opera critic was privileged to be asked to present the show. For the avoidance of doubt, I’m the one in the screen shot who isn’t swimming. It will be available online shortly. In the meantime, the nine Project songs can be found individually here, along with other delights.
For sheer zaniness and brio, a short opera film based on the life of Julie d’Aubigny, from composer Whitney George and librettist Wallis Darke can take my biscuit any day. A swashbuckling, bisexual swordswoman and opera singer alive during the 17th-century (in those days sopranos were armed with more than a crystal-cracking voice), d’Aubigny fought to cultivate a world in which those who misbehaved got what they deserved. The film, entitled Julie, tells her incredible story, which emphasizes the importance of courage in the face of adversity and the pursuit of equality for all.
Ives’ better known orchestral and chamber works such as – Symphony No.3 (the Camp Meeting), Central Park in the Dark and A Symphony, New England Holidays, established the tender roots of classical music firmly in American soil, drawing on folk themes, spirituals and experimenting with bitonal and polytonal harmonisations.
Largely unrecognised by the public in his early composing career, Ives nonetheless commanded the respect of his brethren composers. Asked which American composer he admired most, Arnold Schönberg flashed back, “His name is Ives.” Aaron Copland’s works, for example Appalachian Spring, celebrating simple American hill-folk quaker values, owe much to Ives’ inspiration. As does George Gershwin’s American in Paris, its evocative parp-parping horns drawn from the sound pictures painted in Ives’ cityscape Central Park in the Dark.
The Ives Songbook gathers dust, which is why New Camerata shook it down, blew off the cobwebs and created nine sharply crafted cameos. Pop videos, sort of. Producer, Paul Ashey, is satisfactorily anarchic. There is a papier-mache dog in My Lou Jennine, unsurprisingly about an owner’s love for his dog; a pair of dangling, dancing spectacles and immersion in an aquarium in Children’s Hour; and a pell-mell visit to Coney Island fairground, replete with violently coloured ice-cream cones in The Circus Band.
The videos are fast moving and cut sharply from shot to shot. The songs are narrative, concise, their lyrics drawn from wide sources – Longfellow, Milton, Heyduk (the Czech Adolf Heyduk came as news to me) James Fenniman Cooper, Anton Strelezki and, of course, Ives. Think Schubert or Brahms lieder, but more rooted in the everyday mundane, rather than gloomy German forest myth, and you will be getting close.
Neely Bruce, composer, Ives Scholar and Professor of Music at Wesleyan University, was closely involved with the project and plays the piano accompaniment in lively style. He guided me to the Schönberg comment and pointed out that Webern, Stravinsky and Bartok also were influenced by Ives.
Watching the five minutes of scrolling credits for the wonderful Metropolitan Opera’s Met Stars Live in Concert series, featuring a veritable army of “best boys”, “third grips”, “second wardrobe assistants” and “flying boom managers”, all for static performances in beautiful, but empty, settings, I marvelled at what the multitasking, cookie-chomping, dime budgeting team of half a dozen or so New Camerata enthusiastic desperados has achieved.
As Julie d’Aubigny must surely have observed as she swashed her way round Paris and her opponents buckled, “all for one and one for all”. New Camerata’s musketeers have marked an important reference point for a neglected American composer. With theatres dark, their Covid-creativeness is a refreshing reminder that at the end of the isolation tunnel a new musical landscape beckons.