The RCA and Columbia Album Anthology (Box Set) CD

In celebration of the Ives 150th anniversary year, Sony Classical proudly presents two of the most authoritative collections ever released of works by this eccentric, prophetic American genius.

The 22-CD box set Charles Ives - The Anthology 1945-1976, brings together the entire discography amassed over three decades by Columbia Masterworks, the label that dedicated itself with unmatched zeal to bringing his visionary works to public attention.

The important albums made by RCA Victor during those years are also included in this, the largest and most comprehensive Ives compilation ever issued. In January 1939 - twelve years after Ives had stopped composing new works altogether - John Kirkpatrick, the pianist who would become the composer's friend and leading collaborator, played his Second Sonata (1916-1919), subtitled "Concord, Mass., 1840-1860" at New York's Town Hall. It was the first public performance of Ives's ferociously demanding masterpiece, and it garnered the first review of his music by a prominent, mainstream critic, who hailed the work as "the greatest music composed by an American".

This was the turning point: "the artist and the work that launched the Ives revolution", as it came to be known. In 1945, Kirkpatrick recorded the "Concord" Sonata for Columbia, which released it on 78s in 1948 and on vinyl a year later. Two decades later, the pianist made the celebrated stereo LP version of his painstakingly revised edition. Both of these still definitive recordings are in Sony's new Ives "Anthology".

In 1949, another outstanding interpreter of American music, William Masselos, gave another long overdue première, Ives's remarkable First Piano Sonata (1909-21). A year later Masselos recorded it for Columbia, then he remade it in stereo for RCA Victor in 1966. Once again, a single artist's two benchmark, though in this case quite different, readings - the later one rather less reverential, more rhapsodic - are included in the new set. Ives's breakthrough as an orchestral composer finally came in 1946, when his Third Symphony "The Camp Meeting" (1901-12) was played in New York - the first time he had ever heard any of his symphonies performed complete.

The next year it won him the prestigious Pulitzer Prize. In 1951, his Second Symphony (1907-09) had it's première, with Leonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall. It was the first time that Ives, by then 77 years old, heard one of his major orchestral compositions played to his own satisfaction. Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic recorded the symphony in 1958, Columbia released it in 1960 along with an invaluable 13-minute bonus record of Bernstein talking about Ives and the symphony's musical quotations. During the 1960s, when the posthumous "Ives Revolution" was in full swing, Bernstein recorded the Third Symphony and the symphony of "New England Holidays".

In 1965, Ives's profoundly searching Fourth Symphony, which Aaron Copland termed "an astonishing conception in every way", had it's première in 1965, with Leopold Stokowski conducting the American Symphony - a Grammy-winning milestone in American music history. In the same year, Morton Gould, conducting the Chicago Symphony for RCA, made the first recording of Ives's First Symphony, begun when he was a student at Yale and still clearly in the European tradition. It also won a Grammy.

Not to be outdone, Eugene Ormandy jumped on the Ives bandwagon in Philadelphia, recording the first three symphonies, the "Holidays" and the beloved orchestral set Three Places in New England (the last-named work twice!) between 1964 and 1974. In that year, in London, José Serebrier, a co-conductor with Stokowski of the hugely complex Fourth's première, recorded a version edited for a single conductor. The New York Times called the performance "stunning" and praised it for "extraordinary control and textural clarity". Every one of these classic performances by Ormandy, Bernstein, Stokowski and Serebrier can be found in the Sony Ives "Anthology".