Charles Ives was the son of an American army band leader in the Civil War. He was born in a prominent family in Danbury Connecticut and got a first class education at Yale. Music was just a side business for Charles, who started work at a life insurance, calculating risks at the actuarial department of the Mutual Life Insurance in New York.
Although he lived until 1954, most of his music was written in the first decades of the twentieth century. It was also not very successful. Even with endorsements from Gustav Mahler and later Arnold Schönberg, it took until 1951 to gain general recognition (mainly through the efforts of Leonard Bernstein). By now he is seen as the quintessential American composer of the twentieth century.
His fourth symphony took fifteen years to finish, and even then Charles kept revising it. The resulting work is of an astounding complexity, so much so that it typically takes two conductors to lead it (also because of the enormous size of the prescribed orchestra). On this recording there are even three.
This is the premiere recording of the work, from 1965. The same performers also did the premiere a few months before. Eleven years after the composer died and forty years after it was written.