Andrew Davis and the Melbourne Symphony begin at the beginning for what is going to be a substantial series devoted Charles Ives’s orchestral works; whether it’s going to be a comprehensive one or not remains to be seen. Completed in 1898, though not performed until 1953, the year before he died, the First Symphony was Ives’s graduation work from Yale. It’s a late-Romantic work, rooted in Tchaikovsky, Brahms and especially Dvořák, and thoroughly well behaved for the most part, too (Ives apparently cut a deal with his teacher Horatio Parker that allowed him a few harmonic indiscretions so long as the the first movement began and ended in the same key), with a convincing weight and a very decent fund of good tunes. But the five-movement Second, finished three years later, is much more self-consciously American in its sources – quoting hymn tunes, marches and popular songs, including Stephen Foster’s Camptown Races, and anticipating the much more radical use of that material to come. Davis and the orchestra capture the energy and moments of naughty-boy wildness in the music right up to the piled-up dissonance of the final chord, always remembering that both symphonies are fundamentally cut from traditional musical cloth. It’s a promising start to the series, though the music will become more interesting as it goes on.
