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His dualities are fascinating but his preoccupations are too fixed.Another fascinating example of duality was the double-life of Kurt Weill: spent half in Weimar Germany, decanting low art into high in socially conscious collaborations with Bertolt Brecht, and half in stage-struck Manhattan, decanting high art into low for Broadway musicals His critics would say he sold out to American commercialism. And nowhere is the force of that paradox more sharply felt than in the small scale of his songs – beautifully represented in the weekend by a joint recital by two singers as American as apple pie, Thomas Hampson and Dawn Upshaw. It was also a joy to hear the immaculate pianism of the accompanist Craig Rutenberg, who conspicuously rose to the occasions when Ives – ever the democrat – offers the pianist centre-stage.As always with these Barbican composer profiles, though, the ultimate Unanswered Question was whether there is enough diversity of method and material in the composer to sustain a weekend of nothing but his music; and if you forced an answer from me on that I’d have to say: probably not. A hugely successful insurance executive as well as a radical composer, his music persistently – and rather relentlessly – interweaves the small-town vernacular of homely all-American melodies with epic transcendental musings on the meaning of existence. But whatever their exact vintage, Ives remains an innovator of extraordinary prescience, playing with tone rows, poly-rhythms, spatial effects and conflicting sound sources long before any of these techniques established themselves in Europe.Of them all, the conflicting sound sources, coercively and sometimes brutally overlaid in the manner of the marching bands he encountered in his childhood, are the most immediately identifiable Ivesian fingerprint; and if this Barbican weekend proved nothing else, it was the dedication with which Ives pursued the reconciliation of irreconcilables through his life and work. Scholars may argue that Ives backdated his scores to make them seem more forward- looking than they really were. But the testimony of the BBC SO weekend was clear enough: that Ives was an artist of genius – certainly the first great composer to emerge from the New World – and that his maverick qualities belong in a great tradition of American experiment that extends backwards to Walt Whitman, forwards to John Cage, and transatlantically to Karlheinz Stockhausen.

Most of them didn’t, in his lifetime; and those that did tended to wait 40 or 50 years for their chance.Such statistics contribute to the received idea of Ives as a semi-crazy maverick who spent his life devising impossible and unplayable music. From the requirement in the piece New England Holidays for up to 100 Jew’s Harps, you realise that this was a composer with scant regard for practicality and a what-the-hell attitude to the likelihood of his more ambitious works ever reaching performance. Like Hemingway, Ives saw himself as a mediator between the old rugged values and the new sophisticated ones, with a mission to prove that creativity could be as tough as sawing wood. In the process he gave himself over to a now-mythic double-existence, replete with paradox and mystery; and that, presumably, is why the BBC SO borrowed the name of one of his scores, The Unanswered Question, as the title for its Charles Ives festival at the Barbican last weekend. It was the latest in an annual series of modern- composer mini-fests which have acquired an almost mythic status of their own: superbly well-prepared, handsomely presented, and supported with lavish documentation.

Through its three-day run of concerts, films, talks and seminars, the Ives weekend was no exception: a magnificent achievement that encompassed three of Ives’s four symphonies and a panoramic sample of other works, from early brass-band marches and choral anthems to the celebrated Concord piano sonata, the songs, and big orchestral scores like Three Places in New England.
Andrew Davis was in exuberant overall command; his supporting artists included master musicians like the London Sinfonietta and Stephen Cleobury; and the BBC SO negotiated some of the most fearsomely convoluted writing in modern orchestral repertory with elegant sleights of many hands that made it all seem cotton-pickin’ easy. And in American music the prime pubertal figure stumbling over that threshold of consciousness was Charles Ives (1874-1954): composer, baseball player, businessman, manufacturer of what he called “manly” dissonances (as opposed to the “pansy” politeness of less robust writing), and in almost every sense the Ernest Hemingway of his art. Chili Bouchier was sacked from Harrods’ Small Ladies Department for impropriety, jumped off the Eiffel Tower in a silent movie (well, sort of slithered, actually), twice refused the hand of Howard Hughes, married a couple of rotters and is hanging on by her fingernails to the end of the century.Asked for the secret of her popularity by a clearly entranced Sue Lawley, she said that she’d been different, she supposed – plump, and nearly always happy, despite some spectacular disasters. She laughed again, slightly sheepishly, when choosing her luxury: like all the girls, she said, she’d need her make-up kit Good for her..