Ives Day 2011 ("There Is a Happy Land")

I don’t often use the phrase “perfect day," but Sunday nearly qualified — sunny fall weather, congenial company, and the music of Charles Ives. It doesn’t get much better than that. I was in Danbury, Conn., for Ives Day 2011. This year’s observance was devoted to the Third Symphony, subtitled “The Camp Meeting,” a jewel of a piece that may be thought of as Ives’s pastoral.

The day adhered to the standard template: a hike up Pine Mountain, where Ives spent a great deal of time as a boy and a young man, followed by visits to the Ives birthplace and gravesite, and wrapping up with music — this time, the Third Symphony, as rendered by the Danbury Symphony Orchestra. Albert Montecalvo conducted a chamber-sized complement of 23 musicians, which is really all the piece needs.

What made the concert unique was the venue. The performance took place on the upper level of a parking garage in downtown Danbury. (It has a name, too: the Charles Bardo Parking Garage behind the Danbury Music Center. Just what does a man have to accomplish in life to have a parking garage named after him — other than, say, owning a parking garage?) Chairs were set up on the sloping concrete, giving us in the audience a view, over the heads of the musicians, of St. James Episcopal Church a block or so away. At the end of the third movement, Ives calls for bells to be played softly, as if heard in the distance. Tubular chimes are generally in concert halls, but in Danbury, the part was given to the St. James carillon, cued by cell phone. It might have been the first performance anywhere in which the church bells used in the Ives Third were real, and perhaps the first to accurately convey the sense of space Ives had in mind when he wrote the piece.

I have heard better performances of the work as a whole, but no studio recording or concert-hall performance will ever recapture, for me, the moment when the St. James chimes began to ring. I know this music like my own home, and I still wasn’t prepared for the effect, which was stunning. I expect to remember it for the rest of my life.

My thanks to Nancy Sudik, the indefatigable director of the Danbury Music Center — and first horn of the Danbury Symphony — for conceiving the performance and making it happen. Nancy also leads the Ives Day tours every year.

In much of his music Ives famously “borrowed” existing tunes, reworking them into contrapuntal fantasies. He based the Third Symphony on a half dozen hymns he’d heard as a boy and played professionally as a church organist, and Nancy, bless her heart, made sure we knew what we were hearing when the orchestra began to play. She had us sing the hymns at the top of Pine Mountain. She had us sing them at the birth house. She had us sing them on the roof of the garage. It got to be too much for me — I’d strained my throat on the first go-round, trying to hit the high E’s in “There Is a Fountain” — but the crowd kept growing throughout the day, and there were always fresh voices for the chorus.

A group of young composition students from the Hartt School of Music, Hartford, joined us at the birth house and stayed with us the rest of the day. Johnny “Guitar” Provo, who is just discovering Ives’s music, drove in from Rhode Island with a couple of friends. He took the hike up the mountain, and later left a pick on the composer’s gravestone. And there was a man I know only as Allan, who drives up from New Jersey every year and who might be the one person in America who can rival me for the title of No. 1 Ivesian. These are my people. It was good to spend a day with them.

Leonard Bernstein, 1917-1989

Leonard Bernstein and Michael Tilson Thomas in Danbury, Conn., 1974. I was there, too, though you can't see me in this picture.

Leonard Bernstein died twenty years ago today, Oct. 14. Bernstein's son Alexander wrote this tribute to commemorate the anniversary. The link was sent to me by Elliot Tomaeno of dot429.com, a website designed, in Elliot's words, "specifically designed to help lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender professionals connect with other LGBT professionals." Thanks, Elliot. Always glad to help.

I appreciated Bernstein more as a conductor than as a composer. (West Side Story is a great score, but oh, it's a bad movie.) I particularly value his recordings of Nielsen, which I still have on vinyl. For all of his public exposure, however, I saw his conduct only once, at the Danbury, Conn., State Fair Grounds in 1974, at a concert celebrating the Ives centenary. I was sixteen years old. Bernstein led the American Symphony Orchestra (I think), in Ives's Second Symphony. Unfortunately, he was not at his best that night. It was a pretty ragged performance, as I recall, and I don’t think it was the musicians' fault, since Michael Tilson Thomas conducted the second half of the program, and for him, they were spot on. Lenny seemed more interested in dancing round the podium than in actually leading the orchestra. At one point, he actually jumped into the air. The motion seemed particularly inappropriate, since nothing much seemed to be happening in the score at the moment. The spectacle left rather a sour taste in my mouth.

But everyone is entitled to an off night, I suppose, and Bernstein's recordings of Ives's music are quite fine. Elliott Carter also has expressed approval of Bernstein's recording of his (Carter's) Concerto for Orchestra, a score he (Bernstein) did not particularly like, or so I understand. A pity, since it's a great piece of music. Perhaps if he had gone back to it, rather than leaving it to Boulez, he might have developed a greater appreciation for it.

Today, the Danbury Fair Grounds are a shopping mall, like every other piece of open land in America.