Though Charles Ives wrote large-scale works, he also thrived on miniatures. Ives’s Sets for Chamber Orchestra are largely based on his songs and display a panoply of style and technique that proves to be among the most colorful and creative of his entire compositional life. The Sets are rife with allusions and borrowings, notably hymn tunes, and reuse several pieces in slightly altered treatments. Set 9 includes The Unanswered Question in its original form. Ives was willing to embrace substitution of instruments, and this recording contains premiere recordings of new realisations and editions.

This album contains world-premiere recordings of Charles Ives’s complete Sets for Chamber Orchestra and Set for Theatre Orchestra. There are 39 new editions; James Sinclair has recorded Sets 1–3 before but in different editions which can be heard on 8559353: ‘A real discovery in this complete set of the Orchestral Sets. This is a fascinating release that offers Ives’s three Orchestral Sets for the first time’ (Gramophone).

ClassicsToday.com commented on Charles Ives’s Symphony no.1 and Emerson Concerto for Piano and Orchestra which can be heard on 8559175: ‘No one active today has a better feel for this music, for its past influences as well as its future destiny, than James Sinclair, and he galvanizes the players of the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland to produce warmly idiomatic, extremely satisfying results’.

Conductor James Sinclair is among the world’s pre-eminent scholars and champions of the music of Charles Ives. He is the executive editor for the Charles Ives Society, supervising the work of Ives scholars throughout the United States. Sinclair has served as music director for four PBS television documentaries, including the Peabody Award-winning film about Ives, A Good Dissonance Like a Man. In 1999, Yale University Press published Sinclair’s 800-page A Descriptive Catalogue of the Music of Charles Ives. He has conducted the world premieres and first recordings of sixteen Ives works.

James Sinclair is currently recording the complete orchestral music of Charles Ives, an eventual eight-disc series for Naxos.

Orchestra New England is unsurpassed among musical ensembles between New York and Boston in the number of commercial recordings it has created; it has long established itself as one of the most innovative and critically acclaimed orchestras in the American Northeast.