Centaur's Songs of Charles Ives features tenor
Andrew Childs in 27 songs of the cranky Yankee reckoned as America's greatest composer of art songs.
Childs has taught at Yale, which served as
Ives' own alma mater, and is on the voice faculty of Missouri State University. While this by itself seems to indicate a pedigree of academic orientation over one of performance,
Childs is a frequent flyer in opera productions and has appeared as a featured soloist with a number of orchestras. This is a very well-planned recital, with the 27 songs organized into three groups of nine reflecting some of
Ives' thematic concepts: childhood, parenthood, and philosophical/political convictions.
Childs' singing is very clear and direct and one can understand every word of the text; no texts are included, nor are any needed if you speak English. Additionally,
Childs' sense of pitch is spot on.
Childs' way of handling
Ives' more vaguely defined directions as to the singer's role in more non-conventional songs is creative, as he is able to temporarily move into a pop voice, shout, speak, and to transcend the baggage that comes with being a trained singer when
Ives asks for it. Likewise, Wei-Han Su's piano accompaniment is elegant, clear, and even transparent, which is saying a lot, given the density of some of
Ives' accompaniments.
The drawback to Centaur's Songs of Charles Ives, and it is a considerable one, is that the voice is not well balanced to the accompaniment; it is rendered too quietly, and the accompaniment frequently overwhelms the soloist throughout the recording, which overall just simply isn't loud enough. About the only song where this is not the rule is "Serenity," where the boxy resonance of the voice suggests digital enlargement of the original signal; although it still doesn't sound right, at least the voice is placed above the piano. While all of
Ives' extant songs have been recorded in one manner or another, it is not as though there is an overage of "good" recordings of them widely available. From a purely performance standpoint,
Andrew Childs' Songs of Charles Ives ranks among the best-recorded collections of
Ives' songs that have appeared since
Jan de Gaetani's milestone Nonesuch LP in the 1970s, and it contains some of the very best recordings of
Ives' music as sung by a tenor.