(++++) SHORT AND SOMETIMES SWEET

Eric Coates: Orchestral Works, Volume 3—Television March; The Three Men; Cinderella; The Dam Busters; Last Love; Sweet Seventeen; The Three Elizabeths. BBC Philharmonic conducted by John Wilson. Chandos. $20.99.

Ives: Sets Nos. 1-10 for Chamber Orchestra; Set for Theatre Orchestra. Orchestra New England conducted by James Sinclair. Naxos. $13.99.

     Small things in music can have great importance – witness the four-note motto that opens Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5. Small complete pieces of music can have great staying power and be highly memorable, too – Strauss polkas, the Alla Turca finale of Mozart’s Piano Sonata No. 11, the finale of Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals, etc. And then there are longer pieces that are essentially assemblages of brief sections – a form that Eric Coates (1886-1957) found particularly congenial. Three of the seven works on a new Chandos release of Coates’ music – the third volume in a series featuring the BBC Philharmonic conducted by John Wilson – are essentially made up of shorter works combined to good effect, while the remaining four pieces are brief and complete unto themselves. Like the two earlier CDs in this series, this one features excellent playing and knowledgeable conducting, but an odd arrangement of the material: the enclosed booklet discusses the music chronologically, but the order in which the works are heard on the disc is arbitrary – their dates are 1946, 1935, 1929, 1954, 1939, 1954 and 1944. Despite the peculiarities of sequencing, the music holds up very well indeed. Coates wrote light (or at least light-ish) music, with a number of the pieces he created after 78-rpm records became available being designed to fit neatly on one side of a disc (Leroy Anderson followed the same pattern). Television March, The Dam Busters, Last Love and Sweet Seventeen are all in the three-to-five-minute range, and all make their points effectively and with plenty of panache, then take their leave before they can become even slightly cloying or overextended. Television March and The Dam Busters are martial and bright without sounding jingoistic, while Last Love and Sweet Seventeen are sweet, lyrical and genuinely (if naïvely) moving. The longer works come across well precisely because they are assembled from so many attractive bits and pieces. Cinderella, a 16-minute suite, consists of no fewer than 11 well-differentiated sections associated with different elements of the famous fairy tale – whose warmer, more romantic elements are the ones Coates chooses to emphasize. The Three Men portrays men from the country, the city and the sea to fine effect, with a great burst of humor in the third section: it is built on an old sea shanty whose last three notes are identical to the first three notes of “Three Blind Mice,” which Coates accordingly introduces and runs with for absolutely no reason except fun. More seriously, The Three Elizabeths portrays Elizabeth I, Elizabeth of Glamis (Queen Consort when the piece was written in 1944), and the then-young Princess Elizabeth – who would become Elizabeth II eight years after Coates composed this work. The music is always engaging and always respectful, its moods ranging from the heroic to the idyllic to the celebratory, its individual sections merging effectively into what is essentially a tone poem celebrating and showing considerable admiration for the British monarchy.

     On the other side of “the pond,” where royalty had long since been cast off, music of even greater pithiness than Coates’ was a specialty of Charles Ives – when he was not creating large and super-complex works, that is. A fascinating new Naxos CD that is brimful of world première recordings features all 10 of the collections of miniatures for chamber orchestra to which Ives gave the title of Set. These are not to be confused with his three Sets for full-size orchestra – which have also been released on Naxos in interpretations by conductor James Sinclair. The 10 newly recorded works – it makes sense to call them “set pieces,” pun intended – are essentially songs without words. But there is nothing Mendelssohnian in Ives’ handling of that form. He stretches the component parts of each Set every which way, and does not hesitate to include the same song (with different instruments and emphases) in multiple pieces: The Indians shows up in four versions, The New River (The Ruined River) in three, Ann Street in two, and so forth. Ives’ miniatures are very small indeed: the longest Set, which runs just over eight minutes, contains six movements, while the shortest runs three minutes and contains three parts. Ives’ freewheeling dissonance and polytonality are everywhere in evidence here, and Sinclair, who is well aware of Ives’ propensity for having different instruments play specific parts at different times, uses the obviously very flexible Orchestra New England to fine effect, showcasing the ensemble’s overall strength as well as the quality of its separate sections and, at times, individual members. Much of Ives’ flexibility in instrumentation derives from his appreciation of theatrical musical performances, and in addition to the 10 Sets assembled from his own songs, this disc includes Set for Theatre Orchestra – which also reuses some of Ives’ own music but, in addition, tosses in various hymns and popular tunes of the early 20^th century. Interestingly, for all the bouncy exuberance and in-your-face dissonance of most of the Sets, the greatest emotional heft of this disc lies in its quieter portions. For example, In the Night, the third and last movement of Set for Theatre Orchestra and the final track on the CD, is calm and elegiac; and the third and last movement of Set No. 9 of Three Pieces is nothing less than The Unanswered Question, one of Ives’ most famous and thoughtfully mystical works, in a version that differs from the standalone one but carries the same level of metaphorical heft and fades away into the same unsatisfied and perhaps unsatisfiable quietude. Ives’ proclivity for giving listeners’ ears a real workout is everywhere present in the Sets, and so are his love of popular tunes, his sincere use and appreciation of sacred music, and his willingness to challenge an audience to perceive his music as simultaneously naïve and profound. To this day, Ives’ works sound like those of no other composer: the Sets, like so many of his compositions, richly repay multiple hearings, their brevity both concealing and elucidating thoughts and feelings that, starting small, seem endlessly to expand.