This is far and away the best program of Ives songs currently available, 31 of them, lasting slightly more than 70 minutes. Most of them come from the monumental collection of 114 Songs that Ives published himself, but there are selections from other sources as well. Ives was a fabulous song-writer, one who really did re-imagine what a song could be, but at the same time one who never lost touch with the need to use every means at his disposal to make the text musically vivid. The program opens with his lovely setting of Feldeinsamkeit, one of four German songs included here--so different from Brahms', but equally valid. The other three are Ich grolle nicht, Du alte Mutter, and Weil' auf mir, all revealing a thorough familiarity with the Lied tradition and its conventions.

Baritone Gerald Finley happily doesn't shy away from some of Ives' thornier material. He offers a stunningly characterized General William Booth Enters Into Heaven, one of the very greatest of the songs, and his attack on Swimmers has all of Fischer-Dieskau's gusto with none of his tendency to bark. Accompanist Julius Drake is splendid here, as he is with all of the often virtuosic accompaniments. Some of the most popular songs, such as Memories, Like a Sick Eagle, Ann Street, and The Housatonic at Stockbridge, appear on other collections pretty regularly, but Finley manages to personalize them all.

Perhaps most memorable is Charlie Rutledge, where Finley's lazy, not-very-precise Texas drawl really does capture the strangeness of this tragicomic, off-kilter narrative, and kudos to Drake for including his own raucous vocal part (in the score, but almost never performed) during the roundup episode, just before poor Charlie meets his maker to the pulverizing sounds of perfectly timed fists pounding down on the keyboard. Finley also gives a deeply moving performance of Thoreau, a song extracted from the Concord Sonata--and several other pieces (Walking, When Stars are in the Quiet Skies, The New River, Tolerance, and the very last, A Song -- For Anything) will be new to many listeners. The sonics are ideally balanced, warm, and tangible. An Ives song program offers such a challenging mix of styles that very few singers capture their full range of expression. Finley does, and then some. [9/9/2005]

--David Hurwitz