Tilson Thomas has managed the impossible: a totally satisfying overview of Ives's genius on one sixty-five minute cd. Songs, symphonies, psalms and tone poems - they're all represented, and imaginatively sequenced as an organic whole - only someone who had an intimate knowledge and understanding of Ives could have made it work as well as this.

If anyone has a hot-line to the cortex of Ives's imagination, it's Michael Tilson Thomas. The programme he's devised here isn't so much a journey, more a stream of consciousness through the hinterlands of Ives Americana. It's about the things that mattered to Ives: the times, places, events that fashioned the nation and enabled it to find its own way. It's a landscape of ballad songs and snatches, of hymns, marches, tall tales and short orders, assembled exactly as the man remembered them and entirely in keeping with the chaotic comedy of life. But above all, it's about the spirit within us all – great and small.
From the Steeples and the Mountains is classic Ives: a visionary statement fashioned from bare essentials, bells and brass dissonances always just a whisper away from a recognisable hymn tune.
Then from the mountains to the back yard – recollections of a very American childhood. Picket fences and parlour songs. Like The Things OurFathers Loved written 16 years after the craggy bell and brass piece. You can be sure the Ives chronology will constantly wrong-foot you. Thomas Hampson is the man entrusted with these rich pickings from the Ives songbook. He lustily makes a drama out of a crisis in Charlie Rutlage, a cowboy song turned operatic gran scena. Later he's the Salvation Army's General William Booth banging the drum for all his pimps, floosies, and drunks – his 'saved souls' – as he leads them towards that great courthouse in the sky. Then one of the most heartfelt of all Ives songs, TomSails Away – a life in a song from cradle to grave.
Such juxtapositions make this all-live compilation especially affecting. Hard to believe that this is a live recording, so astonishingly lucid and transparent is the multi-layered orchestral sound. Tremendous impact, too.
Finally, a beautiful performance of that little masterpiece The Unanswered Question, as close as we get to an understanding of what spirituality actually meant to Ives. A superb disc.