This CD is labeled the “complete” piano music of now 100 year old Elliott Carter, who wrote surprisingly little of this type of music. One would have though the piano a perfect instrument for the realization of Carter’s sometimes formidable and indigestible polyphonic textures, but on further reflection (and hearing this music) you can begin to understand how important sonority is to this composer, and that the piano is in fact rather limited for his purposes, unlike someone like George Crumb, who founded a whole orchestra in the instrument. Curiously, five of the seven pieces here are from post-1990, and four hail from within the last 10 years. These are mostly pieces of short duration, indicating to an even stronger degree that the composer really doesn’t think that highly of the instrument.
Then again, the “warhorses” on this album, the freakish and haunting Night Pieces (also played to dark perfection on an Etcetera disc by Charles Rosen) and the superb and monumentally effective Piano Sonata are works that reward each and every time they are heard, and that is something that I am rarely prepared to say about Carter’s music, which usually passes through the brain in as incomprehensible a manner as it must have been composed, and rarely leaves anything more than a vague impression of its style. You cannot discern meaning in this music, nor do I think that was ever Carter’s intent—his writing is simply too difficult to be apprehended in the way we normally process it. Yet he is also profoundly aware that the way we listen is really the only way to listen, and writes his compositions accordingly, hoping to convey a feeling, sensation, something that affects the senses. When listening to this music the first thing that the listener has to do is lay aside all preconceptions and simply allow the music to speak for itself without trying to dissect it as if it were Appalachian Spring.
All of the pieces here are interesting, but the towering Piano Sonata reigns supreme, a post-war masterpiece inspired by mentor Charles Ives’s own Concord and urged on by Carter’s acquaintance with the newly written Copland and Barber sonatas. There is discernable structure, even fugal episodes, which point the way to the Carter of the future, while paying tribute to the music of the past, albeit in a very veiled form. This and the Night Fantasies make for a mandatory disc, played to perfection by Ursula Oppens as perhaps only she is really qualified to do. Add excellent sound, and you have a modernist gem that is well worth exploring by those even with more conventional tastes.
— Steven Ritter
