Music of ELLIOTT CARTER, Volume 8: Horn Concerto; Mad Regales; Tintinnabulation; Wind Rose; Sound Fields; On Conversing with Paradise; Retracing; Retracing II; Retracing III; Figment III; Figment IV; Figment V; Clarinet Quintet; La Musique; Due Duetti; Poems of Louis Zukofsky – Martin Owen, William Purvis, horn/ BBC Singers/ New England Conservatory Percussion Ensemble/ BBC Symphony Orchestra/ Leigh Melrose, baritone/ Birmingham Contemporary Music Group/ Peter Kolkay, bassoon/ Charles Neidich, clarinet/ Juilliard String Quartet/ Simon Boyar, marimba/ Lucy Shelton, soprano/ Jon Nelson, trumpet/ Rolf Schulte, violin/ Fred Sherry, cello/ Donald Palma, contrabass/ Hsin-Yun Huang, viola – Bridge 9314 (2 CDs), 103:01 [Distr. by Albany] *****:
The amazing Elliott Carter is amassing a catalog that is likely to be unprecedented when all is said and done. We gawk in awe when hearing of Verdi completing Falstaff at the age of 80, but Carter, now 102, shows no signs of stopping. His work is, to be sure, very controversial, spanning a series of styles that span the gamut from easily tonal to some of the thorniest music you will ever hear. That particular style seemed to really take hold in the late 1960s and has not let up since. Or at least I thought.
I remain haunted by my first serious exposure to Carter’s music on a Columbia LP that was part of the Modern Masters series (I think that was the name) of his second and third Quartets, played by the Juilliard Quartet from around 1973. It is still some of the most complex and rigorously impenetrable music I have ever heard. The descriptions at the time spoke of “dialogue” among the instruments, and “contrasts” and many other things that seemed to me at the time—and still do—to be intellectual constructs that put music on the level with rational thought alone and remove it from the emotional plane, though I’ll wager Carter would take issue with that assessment. But I must say that hearing these discs, which are comprised of music—with the exception of Retracing I-III, composed after the composer’s 97th birthday—you heard me right—shows him as still learning, and still evolving. In truth there is not a piece here that I did not enjoy listening to, and for me to say that about Carter is quite amazing indeed.
One of the things that possibly make this album so enjoyable is because of the staggering number of types of works along with their corresponding variances in ensembles. Of these the most “substantial” pieces—for argument’s sake, those over 10 minutes long—are the Horn Concerto, written to show off the many facets of the horn as demonstrated by Boston Symphony hornist James Sommerville, the extended orchestral song On Conversing with Paradise based on lines from Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, and continuing Carter’s predilection for setting great poets, and the Clarinet Quintet written for Charles Neidich and the Juilliard String Quartet, perhaps the most fervent advocates of Carter’s music to ever take the stage. You will excuse me if I call this music “accessible modernism” because I don’t want to mislead anyone into thinking they are getting the Gershwin Preludes; but at the same time there is something about the direct emotional appeal coupled with an always-intense sense of form and construction that is different somehow from the earlier, pricklier Carter pieces.
The aforementioned Retracings are just that—single line works taken from earlier compositions and expanded upon somewhat for solo instruments, in this case the bassoon (I), horn (II), and trumpet (III). Along the path of solo instruments we also get something that reminds me a bit of the Berio Sequenzas, the short Figments for contrasbass (III), viola (IV, and one of the composer’s favorite instruments), and marimba (V). Carter has long been an effective composer of choral music (see the first volume of this Bridge series) and his John Ashbery-based Mad Regales for a madrigal group continues this tradition. It was Edgard Varese’s seminal percussion work Ionisation that inspired Carter, many years later, to take up the challenge and create a piece called Tintinnabulation that outdoes the modernist master by almost doubling the amount of percussionists (13) and using 65 indeterminately–pitched instruments.
Sound Fields (for string orchestra) and Wind Rose are actually twins in comportment and theory, Carter wishing to contrast the idea of thick textures with thin ones by using a 12-part texture based on a single all-interval 12 note chord that is revealed only gradually. The results for each ensemble, though related in premise, are quite different in outcome. Due Duetti pits violin and cello against one another while having them trade off and elaborate on common material. Finally, to return to vocal music once again, Carter’s life-long love and mastery of the French language led him to set a solo soprano piece to texts by Charles Baudelaire called La Musique, and a major cycle for clarinet and soprano based on poems of Louis Zukofsky, whose son Paul, a noted violinist who played much of Carter’s music and is among the modernist musical establishment, receives the dedication to this important English-poem work.
This must have been a nightmare for David Starobin, head of Bridge Records, to put together, involving many venues with so many performers whose schedules had to be accommodated. To his credit and the other engineers I say “bravo” for such consistency of sound and wonderful performances. This easily serves as a fine introduction to Carter’s work, and is a real tribute to a composer that, while not always easy to understand, never stops in his own pursuit of understanding.
— Steven Ritter
