**** Helen Boatwright

THE SONGS OF CHARLES IVES AND ERNST BACON

(CRI)

About 30 years ago I heard a concert at Sanders Theatre I'll never forget -- a song cycle by Hindemith sung by the American soprano Helen Boatwright. The singing was limpid, honest, emotionally open. Her diction was perfect. Her voice was exquisite. For years, the recording of hers I wanted most was an album of songs by the cantankerous Charles Ives, where she was accompanied by the great Ives pianist/editor/scholar John Kirkpatrick, on the small Overtone label. In 1974, CBS (now Sony) released a landmark five-LP Ives set commemorating the centennial of his birth (now also out of print). There were performances by Leonard Bernstein, Michael Tilson Thomas, and even rare recordings of Ives himself, both playing and singing! One of the highlights of that set was an entire LP devoted to Ives songs, with Boatwright and Kirkpatrick. The original 1954 album has now been reissued by CRI -- Composers Recording, Inc. -- and it's a gem.

"A song has a few rights, the same as other ordinary citizens," Ives wrote. "If it feels like walking along the left-hand side of a street . . . or sitting on a curb, why not let it?" There's nothing predictable about Ives's songs. And they include an extraordinary variety: parlor ballads, hymn tunes, and setting of short poems and other texts that caught his eye in the daily newspapers. A particularly exquisite minute-long song, "Two Little Flowers" (1921), is to a poem by Harmony Twichell Ives, Ives's wife, about their six-year-old daughter Edith and her playmate Susanna. The quirky little "Ann Street" (about a street) sets a poem by someone named Maurice Morris that Ives found in the New York Herald on January 12, 1921. At the other end of the spectrum is the almost satiric rambunctiousness and sublimity of Ives's amazing 1914 setting of Vachel Lindsay's "General William Booth Enters into Heaven" -- a nearly six-minute musical phantasmagoria.

This CD also includes Helen Boatwright singing a series of Emily Dickinson poems set to music by Ernst Bacon, a colleague of her composer/violinist husband at Syracuse University, with the composer himself at the piano. Bacon worked on these from the 1930s to the 1960s, and they're affective without nearly the daring of what Ives wrote decades earlier.

-- Lloyd Schwartz