WORLD PREMIÈRE RECORDINGS

Malmö Symphony Orchestra and Chorus,
James Sinclair

• When asked to define a masterpiece in music Stravinsky chose Ives’s Decoration Day, a tone poem that Ives later made the second movement of his Holidays Symphony (its first movement, ‘Washington’s Birthday’, is available on Naxos 8.559087).

• The remaining movements also celebrate key American holidays with characteristic verve.

• The General Slocum movingly commemorates a 1904 boating disaster in which more than a thousand people lost their lives.

• The Overture and Postlude are early works that nonetheless display Ives’s originality, while Yale- Princeton Football Game exuberantly depicts a legendary 1897 match.

“James Sinclair leads excellent performances. The Malmo Symphony sounds comfortable in the American idiom, and the recording is spacious, sweet sounding in the strings…You should have the Naxos regardless of what other Ives recordings you have.” American Record Guide on 8.559353