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 8559087).

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.