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St. Olaf Choir's first internationally produced CD focuses on rare works of Charles Ives

By Elizabeth Child
January 22, 2003

NORTHFIELD, Minn. -- Glasgow-based Linn Records recently released a CD of the St. Olaf Choir, under the direction of Dr. Anton Armstrong, performing works by Charles Ives (1874-1954). The CD is called The Celestial Country. It is the first recording of the choir to be released internationally and the first to be broadly distributed in major retail book and music stores.

Anton Armstrong
Armstrong
Executive Producer Malcolm Bruno selected the St. Olaf Choir after hearing the ensemble on campus. "I was immediately struck by the quality of this choir," Bruno says. "When I heard the St. Olaf Choir, I heard a vintage sound of 75 beautifully honed voices. There are lots of big choirs, but I hadn't heard one with such focused sound before, a legacy of its founder, F. Melius Christiansen, whose first performances with the choir were nearly 100 years ago."

In addition to introducing the St. Olaf Choir to a broad, international audience, the Ives selections the ensemble has recorded "resurrect lost treasures," Armstrong says, because few recordings of the works exist. The title selection is a romantic oratorio, uniquely American in its optimism and eclecticism. "Silence Accompanied" is a contemplative song cycle created by Bruno using about a dozen of Ives' 140 songs.

The CD release is the 11th since Armstrong took the baton at St. Olaf in 1990.

The St. Olaf Choir is best known for its national PBS broadcasts and recordings of the annual St. Olaf Christmas Festival. "Linn will get the choir in front of a different audience and bring our group broad international exposure," Armstrong says.

'The Celestial Country'
The title selection, "The Celestial Country," was composed just before 1900, when Ives was in his mid-20s and America was becoming the economic and cultural center of the new world. Bruno says he felt a symbiosis between the youthful energy of the St. Olaf Choir and a youthful Ives -- before Ives' more iconoclastic musical experiments in the early 20th century. "The Celestial Country" evokes elements of the Victorian era's latent sentimentality, "but this is a class apart," according to Bruno, who says he aimed to reproduce an authentic sound: "In recording 'The Celestial Country,' we were creating a wonderful view of a vanished world - like restoring a Tiffany window. Once the glass has been cleaned, we can see through it and appreciate its beauty on its own terms. The sound of this choir must harken back to the best of what Ives could have heard in the 1890s in optimum conditions -- and this is a tribute to Anton and the tradition begun by Christiansen."

"The Celestial Country" is an oratorio formatted after "Hora Novissima," by Horatio Parker, a professor of Ives' at Yale University. Parker's oratorio was the largest orchestral/choral piece ever composed by an American at the time, in 1892, and it made use of the medieval poetry of Bernard of Cluny in its original Latin. While Parker, who had studied in Munich, was influenced directly by contemporary German composers -- such as Richard Wagner and Gustav Mahler -- Ives, who never studied in Europe, was also influenced by the music of his father, a band master in the Civil War, and of his mother, who sang American church hymns.

For his oratorio, written under the spell of Parker, Ives took portions of the same Cluny poem but translated them into English. "He mixed the dissonance of the 20th-century sound of disconnected fragments with Wagnerian phrases and combined them with the heroic quality of hymns," Bruno says. Unlike the European style of his day, "to be eclectic in America wasn't an offense," he adds. Bruno credits Ives with being the American composer who almost single-handedly cut the umbilical cord with Europe, establishing a confident new tradition on which the major composers who followed him would build.

'Silence Accompanied'
"Silence Accompanied" is a song cycle of solo and choir works -- which Bruno drew from a larger collection of Ives' work -- that seemed to fit together. "Ives had started to study how he could develop a number of different song cycles, but they never really came to fruition," Bruno says. "This is my idea of the sort of cycle Ives might have assembled and orchestrated."

The title comes from a line in poet John Milton's song "Evening."

"More Debussy than anything Germanic, it experiments with stillness and the microcosmic events that stir it -- quite often in the voice -- of tiny distant bells," Bruno says.

The cycle spans Ives' career, starting with two songs written mid-career: "Adagio" (before 1912) for strings, piano and bells, and "Mists" (1910) with text by Harmony T. Ives, the composer's wife. Two other works, "Hymn" (1904) and "A Christmas Carol" (1894), refer back to find a reflective tendency already latent in the early and middle periods. The cycle also includes the last piece Ives ever composed, the abstractly beautiful "Sunrise."

In the 1920s, Ives put down his pen, never to pick it up for the remaining 28 years of his life. "He came downstairs one day with tears in his eyes and said he couldn't compose anymore -- nothing went well, nothing sounded right," said Harmony Ives. He went on to run his successful insurance practice until his death in 1954. Before he died, however, Ives was gaining recognition as a composer, and he was already a major influence for many American composers, including George Gershwin, Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland.

The Celestial Country CD is available at the St. Olaf College bookstore, by visiting www.stolafrecords.com or by calling 888-232-6523. It is also available at music stores throughout the Twin Cities, including Borders and Barnes & Noble.

St. Olaf College, a national leader among liberal arts institutions, fosters the development of mind, body and spirit. It is a residential college in Northfield, Minn., and affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). The college provides personalized instruction and diverse learning environments, with nearly two-thirds of its students participating in international studies.

Contact David Gonnerman at 507-786-3315 or gonnermd@stolaf.edu.