Carl Ruggles's muted brass Angels, however, is unexpectedly pungent in its intensity, and far from angelic in the sinister implications of its compressed dissonance, yet the score is marked ''Serene''. Elliott Carter's arrangement of Purcell is quite haunting, with its repeated, tolling, bell-like note sounding throughout. The concert opens and closes with that great American original, Charles Ives. The title piece, From the steeples and the mountains, is scored for four sets of bells, trumpet and (here) trombones and the composer never heard it performed. Its effect is characteristically wild, with the polytonality simulating and extending the clangorous confusion of bell changes when completely disordered. Ives wrote on the score exultantly: ''From the Steeples—the Bells—then the Rocks on the Mountains begin to shout!'' The disc ends with the resplendent Let there be Light, and one can understand why the New York Central Presbyterian Church Choir, to whom it was dedicated (in 1901), found the composer's visonary musical excursions not quite comfortable. Performances throughout are first-rate, and the very realistic recording, made in All Hallows, Gospel Oak has just the right degree of resonance; it is splendidly balanced.

-- Ivan March, Gramophone [5/1992]