Resourceful edits

It is a little known fact that Charles Ives' catalog of works is dominated by over 200 songs. After all, the father of the American avant-garde has gone down in history as the creator of groundbreaking orchestral works. The entire cosmos of Ives' aesthetic between down-to-earth folklore and bold experimentation, romantic eclecticism and visionary progressiveness, this unique blend of invention, parody and quotation is also reflected in concentrated form in his impressive oeuvre of songs.

The cleverly put together Songbook speaks volumes in this respect. Its special feature: these are instrumentations for ensemble. This makes particular sense in Ives' case: firstly, the composer has interwoven his material in an almost labyrinthine way in a wide variety of works and instrumentations; secondly, his songs, with their extremely suggestive piano part, which often refers to very specific everyday music (even from the text), virtually cry out for instrumental "coloring".

But as an arranger, Sebastian Gottschick does not organize a musical "painting by numbers". His wonderful orchestrations not only take account of Ives' spectacular polystylistics, when intermezzi such as All the way around and back or Gyp the Blood become polyrhythmic chaos. Unfortunately, we can only hint here at how sensitively and imaginatively Gottschick (himself also a composer) not only does justice to the different, sometimes abruptly changing tonalities within a song, but also productively carries them forward in the ensemble. He has refined the tonal extravagances just as resourcefully as the ironic refractions and parodistic exaggerations.

The same goes for the singers. Jeannine Hirzel and Omar Ebrahim find a multitude of nuances in this kaleidoscope of American turn-of-the-century music, cleverly breaking up the kitsch factor in the very first song and doing credit to Ives' ideal of a non-academically straightened interpretation.