Main Menu · Search ·Current Issue ·Contact ·Archives ·Centennial ·Letters to the Editor ·FAQs

Unsettling Scores

Despite the Pulitzer prizes, the esteem of highly regarded musicians like pianist Ursula Oppens and the Juilliard Quartet, and wide recognition as one of the greatest living American composers, Elliott Carter and his work remain--in this, his ninetieth birthday year--a ghostly, remote presence to the concertgoing public. That's understandable. He competes with hordes of other modern and contemporary composers for that "new music" slot in a typical concert program. Recordings of his music are generally on smaller labels, and so get little publicity and limited distribution. But far more important, his music--a selection of which has just been issued by Oppens and the Arditti Quartet--has a reputation for being difficult, even ornery. Some conductors I've spoken to won't even program music like Carter's, because "it doesn't have a fighting chance with the audience."

This CD's six pieces include three new works, one of which--the Fifth String Quartet--should get a fair amount of notice if only because Carter's second and third string quartets both won Pulitzers. The Arditti Quartet, to whom the piece is dedicated, takes a visceral, impassioned approach. Effects range from pizzicato sections when the instruments sound ready to crack open, to slow-changing, eerily suspended chords made of harmonics, like a musical interpretation of shifting fog. Some rare opportunities to explore how the piece is humorous (a boorish, repetitive splat the violin makes in the first movement, for instance) pass the players by, but their tack is convincing otherwise. Oppens, for her part, contributes muscular playing to the Duo for Violin and Piano, and the cello sonata--one of Carter's more lyrical and popular pieces--and a jazzy feel to 90+ (a commission for Italian composer Goffredo Petrassi's ninetieth birthday in 1994, but reprised here for Carter's own).

It is hard going to listen to Elliott Carter, primarily because his music is based on ideas that most of us would find foreign, and not strictly musical. For instance, the easiest, and most commonly cited, way to think about a piece of his chamber music is as a dramatic scenario. Imagine an ensemble, made up not of instruments, but of characters. Imagine also that these characters have equal parts attraction to and repulsion from each other. You can expect that music with this in mind is likely to emphasize conflict and contrast, rather than coordination. The Duo for Violin and Piano, for example, begins with meek, thin chords from the piano at somewhat regular intervals, a sort of stripped vision of the standard role of piano as accompanist. Between the beats, the violin alternates between worried double stops and athletic strides up and down its range. The independence of the material for each instrument, and lack of communication between them, can almost be nerve-racking. In fact, there are some silences in this piece so maddeningly filled with the next moment--usually the expectation of a beat playfully withdrawn--that it evokes a tense conversation a resentful married couple might have. The piece develops so that both instruments interact in a more intact and wildly gestural way, but the violin ends the piece pretty much as it began, as a soloist.

One benefit of grappling with contemporary music this challenging is that you'll feel a sense of plush relief when you return to Brahms or Bach. (Granted you're not likely to read about this perk in publicity materials--"Philip Glass's music will make you beg for more...Beethoven!") But I bet you won't listen to them in the same way. After hearing Carter's quartets, I was surprised at how much it changed the way I listened to Beethoven's late quartets, how modern and alien they sounded. As Ursula Oppens explains it, "The expectation that a concert's purpose is just to soothe really violates the music. In that way, you've taken the excitement and the danger out of earlier music as well." Wrestle with a composer as rigorous as Carter, and you, too, can expect to shake up the classics.

Among other recent discs received at this office: Night Crossing: Works for One and Two Pianos by Frederic Rzewski '58 (Music & Arts CD-988), with pianists Rzewski and Oppens, shows off the collage-like work of this lesser known composer; Oppens also contributes a performance of a piano concerto on Joan Tower Concertos (D'Note Classics, DND-1016) with the Louisville Orchestra; a second disc by Max Levinson '93 with N2K, Out of Doors: Piano Music of Béla Bartók (N2K-10028), further confirms why he is one of the most celebrated young pianists of the day.

~ Daniel Delgado

Main Menu · Search ·Current Issue ·Contact ·Archives ·Centennial ·Letters to the Editor ·FAQs