aworks :: "new" american classical music

Three Occasions: A Celebration Of Some 100 x 150 Notes (1986). Elliott Carter /gen span/

Noted classical conductor (and Grateful Dead bassist) Phil Lesh along with eminent composer Elliott Carter will speak with pianist Sarah Cahill on counterstreamradio.org Friday, March 14th at noon PDT. The generational span of those three is in and of itself fascinating; this should be a delightful show.

Here's a quote re: Lesh and Carter:

Phil Lesh, the well-renowned Grateful Dead bassist, is both an admirer and enthusiastic supporter of Carter. In fact, Lesh conducted the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra in a performance of Carter's "A Celebration (of 100 X 150 Notes)."...If you like the "Grateful Dead" you should most definitely discover the works of Elliott Carter.

While it may be a stretch to go from rock to modernism, I did have a Deadhead co-worker who had good things to say about Ornette Coleman after seeing the jazz legend play at a Dead concert.

By the way, I missed the Deadheads for Obama concert at the Warfield in San Francisco last month. Here's the set list and corresponding Barack Obama thank you video. Peace.:

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fact of the day: the rex foundation, a non-profit organization started by grateful dead members and friends, helped fund the knussen carter recording.

Four Lauds for solo violin (1984/1999/2000). Elliott Carter /what happened to the screech?/

I used to hate solo violin music and now I like it. Well, I like this work by Carter anyway; no guarantees if I listen again to Cage's Freeman Etudes.

Syringa (1978). Elliott Carter

Musicwhore doesn't like it but has a good comment re: Elliott Carter's Syringa compared to other of the composer's works:

Syringa is by far the most obtuse of the three, and it's angularity is only heightened by the populism of Holiday Overture and Suite from Pocahontas.

carter on syringa: This attracted me because of its fascinating, distant, quiet treatment of a familiar, many-sided, affecting subject: Orpheus and the power of music.
liner notes: Syringa is the most original of Carter's creations. It is not a song cycle, but a new genre: a cantata, a chamber opera, a polytextural motet, and a vocal double concerto all in one.
lawrence kramer on the text: True, the meditative voice may make this generous acknowledgment of the power of song only in order to get beyond it, to say that "it isn’t enough / To just go on singing."

String Quartet No. 1 (1951). Elliott Carter /got ears?/

Via del.icio.us/pbailey68, Timothy Mangan suggests not marketing classical music as being suitable for everyone, and gives examples:

The string quartets of Elliott Carter: Got four sets of ears? You'll need 'em.

Triple Duo (1983). Elliott Carter /carter now on youtube/

On YouTube, SF Opera staff conductor Donato Cabrera leads the American Contemporary Music Ensemble in Carter's Triple Duo. I gave it a "pretty cool" rating. YouTube also has videos of Cabrera conducting works of a more historical nature.

Violin Concerto (1990). Elliott Carter

I'm listening to a CD of Oliver Knussen conducting the music of Elliott Carter.

After two listens, I still can't parse Three Occasions for Orchestra. Much as I prefer my violin concertos to be aged several hundred years, Carter's Violin Concerto is easier to understand than the first piece since one voice is usually prominent. Still, it strikes me as a dour piece. Although presumably difficult to play, I don't get a sense of virtuosic showmanship and a result, this is not much fun. And if I want to experience Carter's compositional rigor, I prefer the clarity of his works for piano or string quartet (or even his Piano Concerto).

On the other hand, Edgard Varèse's orchestral music also strikes me as dour but yet somehow more satisfying (albeit noisier). If only he wrote a violin concerto...

Intermittences (2005). Elliott Carter

Jeremy Eichler reviews pianist Peter Serkin including a performance of the ninety-seven-year-old Elliott Carter's Intermittences:

You can only guess at Mr. Carter's thicket of memories, but this taut, brittle nine-minute piece certainly captures the intensity of Proustian recollection.

From the program notes by the composer and Paul Griffiths:

The Proust reference is to a section in which Marcel returns to the Grand-Hôtel in the seaside resort of Balbec and, bending to unbutton his boots, is overwhelmed by the memory of his deceased grandmother.

String Quartet No. 4 (1986). Elliott Carter

And after that burst of archaic nationalism, iTunes served up Elliott Carter's Fourth String Quartet. While I can't say I enjoyed the juxtaposition of hardcore modernism and patriotic pastiche, the quartet is always interesting. For good measure, iTunes followed with Barber's First Essay giving me a chance to assimilate my American music experience for the day.

Elliott Carter:

On another level, American works are seldom the product of working methods characteristic of many important European composers, who have gone about their work in a systematic way, carefully coordinating musical means and ends at every level while weeding out initially accepted elements that did not contribute to their specific intentions. For often it seems that they must have formed a very clear idea of what they wished to accomplish, and were determined to pursue this down to the smallest details of their work. In my opinion, it is the very absence of this sharpness of focus and close coordination of means in terms of a very clarified musical intention that gives the good works of American music their special freshness and makes the listener sense in them an aesthetic point of view different from the more or less standard European one.

But wouldn't Carter's own methods be classified as European by this definition?

 

Dialogues (2003). Elliott Carter

Recent relevant reviews from Classics Today:

10/10. Dialogues for Piano & Chamber Orchestra et al. Elliott Carter. Hodges et al. Bridge. Amazon #19,611. You would never guess that these four compact, vivacious, and imaginatively crafted concertos are the work of a man in his 90s.

10/10. Bells for Stokowski. Jerry Junkin. Telarc. Amazon #15,019. David del Tredici is less radical than Daugherty in the post-Romantic original wind work, which he named In Wartime because composition of this commission coincided with the four months of debate and build-up before the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

10/10. Symphony No. 3 "Kaddish." Leonard Bernstein. Gerard Schwarz. Naxos. Amazon #81,969. The more time passes, the more Leonard Bernstein's "Kaddish" symphony sounds like an important work.

10/10. A Song for Anything - Charles Ives. Finley, Drake. Hyperion. Amazon #33,338. This is far and away the best program of Ives songs currently available, 31 of them, lasting slightly more than 70 minutes.

10/10. Symphony No. 4 et al. Alan Hovhaness. Keith Brion et al. Naxos. Amazon #105,411. But there is enough difference in the inspiration of these works, and enough stylistic development, that you don't really get an impression of sameness.

10/9. The Unknown Ives, Volume 2. Berman, Drury. New World Records. Amazon #195,083. Berman not only understands Ives' volatile aesthetic but also feels it in his bones, and more importantly, is a fearless pianist with a huge, totally ambidextrous technique and big sound to match.

9/8. Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra et al. Alan Hovhaness. Konstantin Krimeta et al. Black Box. Amazon #112,175. Several familiar ingredients of Alan Hovhaness' early style combine to make a dish of rather unusual flavor in his Concerto for two pianos and orchestra.

Three Illusions (2004-05). Elliott Carter

Richard Dyer reviews an American concert by James Levine and the Boston Symphony, including a mostly new work by 96-year-old (!) Carter, with the composer in attendance:

The world premiere was two-thirds of Carter's ''Three Illusions." All three brief pieces are responses to literary fantasies -- ''Micomicon," premiered last season, to ''Don Quixote"; the brand new ''The Fountain of Youth" to Roman myth; and ''More's Utopia" to Sir Thomas More's vision of an ideal society. The music is fantastical too: There is no way to know what's going to bubble up next, but it is always surprising, inevitable, and vividly orchestrated.

Andrew Clark in the Financial Times:

The piece, lasting barely 10 minutes, is music stripped to its essense. The ideas are strong, the syntax beguiling, the effect dumbfounding.

And in Chicago, Wynne Dellacoma reviews the premiere of Carter's Soundings, where Daniel Barenboim both conducts and plays piano (with Carter attending the second night):

Carter came up with an ingenious solution, organizing the 12-minute "Soundings'' so that piano and orchestra never played together. In brief comments before the piece Thursday night, Barenboim joked that he didn't know what Carter might be trying to tell him with such a strict separation of powers.

I had to check; composer Leo Ornstein wrote his Eighth Piano Sonata at age 98 and died eleven years later.

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