Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Before the year is out, there is just time to mark the 150th anniversary of American maverick Charles Ives (1874-1954). Even today, when musical boundaries are breaking down, Ives’s music remains niche and, with relatively few live performances outside the US, it is good that recordings are so plentiful.Jeremy Denk is an enthusiast. This two-disc set includes recordings of Ives’s four, typically weird and wonderful violin sonatas by violinist Stefan Jackiw, together with re-releases of Denk’s earlier recordings of the two piano sonatas.In his notes Denk makes a connection between Mahler and Ives as composers whose music harks back to stimuli from their childhoods. In Ives’s case, that means the tunes of his father’s marching bands, hymns from the nearby church, popular dances and the distant sound of a lone trumpeter. Do not expect these to be woven into traditional classical forms. They jostle together, linked only by the electrical impulses of Ives’s imagination.This produces not only rumbustious chaos, as in the second movement of the Violin Sonata No 2, where country fiddling and urban ragtime rub shoulders with a whistle-stop tour of 20th-century musical styles, but also episodes of visionary calm, like the middle movement of the Violin Sonata No 4, “Children’s Day at the Camp Meeting”, with the sounds of nature recalling happy summer days.At peak moments, both here and in the piano sonatas, the technical virtuosity of this music is equal to any, and Jackiw and Denk sound positively joyous in meeting its challenges.★★★★☆‘Ives Denk’ is released by Nonesuch
