ALL BLUES 40TH EDITION

To celebrate his 100th birthday, Elliott Carter’s Complete String Quartets have been newly recorded by the Pacifica Quartet, Musical America’s 2009 Ensemble of the year.

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

• Elliott Carter wrote some of the most challenging and probing works of the latter half of the 20th and first years of the 21st century. Violinist Caroline Chin and cellist Brian Snow excel in this literature.

Elliott Carter is the one of America's most distinguished creative artist in any field. - Aaron Copland nominating Elliott Carter for the "Gold Medal of the National Institute of Arts and Letters for Eminence in Music" (1971). Two important pieces of the American composer - who won the Pulitzer Prize twice - are now available on CD (re-release of WERGO LP WER 60124): "In Sleep, In Thunder" and "Triple Duo". "In Sleep, In Thunder" is a setting of six poems by the late Robert Lowell and composed "in memory of the poet and friend". Black comic parodies and ice-cold irony determine the atmosphere of the six songs. For Carter the way out of the black world of the Lowell cycle was "Triple Duo", a work whose comic mood appears in it's very opening where the players are caught in the act of warming up before beginning.

Classical Music

Ursula Oppens has been a steadfast and masterful champion of Elliott Carter's music for more than three decades, and her recital encompassing the prolific 100-year-old composer's complete piano music clearly is a labor of love. What is more, her interpretations have evolved. For example, Oppens' 1998 Night Fantasies recording (Music & Arts) abounds with dead-on accuracy and drive. However, it sounds relatively earnest and literal next to this far more flexible, overtly contrasted, and color-conscious remake. Oppens also has rethought and internalized "90 +" to the point where her detached and legato articulations now are more sharply profiled and truer to Carter's written dynamics.

In her vivid, incisive performance of the early Piano Sonata Oppens particularly relishes the grand sonorities and overtones resulting from the composer's imaginative use of the sostenuto pedal, although her softest playing ultimately lacks Charles Rosen's magical tonal allure. Two recent works appear in their first recordings: Oppens imparts a strong sense of line via her precise yet unhurried handling of Caténares' rapid repeated notes (shades of Ravel's Scarbo); conversely, she forges a welcome, multi-dimensional tonal landscape from Matribute's continuous single-line texture. Superb production values (thanks to producer Judith Sherman and the Academy of Arts and Letters' marvelous acoustics) and informative booklet notes add further value to a significant release for Carter's centennial year, or any other year for that matter.

--Jed Distler, ClassicsToday.com

UNITED STATES ARMY FIELD BAND JAZZ AMBASSADORS: Legacy of Be

Award-winning composer and pianist Carter Pann is a genuine “musician’s musician”, writing for and working with internationally acclaimed orchestras and ensembles. Composed especially for Joel Hastings, The Piano’s 12 Sides is a remarkable cycle that takes us through song-like introspection, fearless virtuosity, timeless impressions of cosmic realms and dances both ebullient and macabre. The Bills owes its ragtime influence to Scott Joplin while acknowledging two great exponents of the genre. The composer describes The Cheese Grater as “an adrenaline driven, mean two-step”. Evocative of a smoky jazz club, Your Touch is the laid-back solo movement from Carter Pann’s GRAMMY®-nominated Piano Concerto (Naxos 8.559043).

More spare, yielding chamber music is found on the new Naxos disc. The 2005 Mosaic is Carter at his most inviting, in a program showing how even his minor works have a strong reason for existence. That disc comes with a bonus DVD documentary on the composer, not the best ever made, but at least providing face time with a composer who is as congenial as he is great.

CARTER: Early Chamber Music

The quartet on this album was nominated for the 2004 Grammy Award for Best Chamber Music Performance.

One of the most difficult aspects in considering the works of a composer with a complex, characteristic (some might say hermetically sealed) style like Carter's is that there's always a temptation to take the lazy way out and just assert that, "Well, it all sounds like Carter, and if you like Carter then you'll like these pieces." And when the performances are as good as these clearly are the attractions of taking the easy option become all but overwhelming. Alas, for good or ill, critics are supposed to offer opinions not just about the quality of performance, but also regarding the works themselves when they are new. The problem with doing this successfully (or even plausibly) in Carter's case is that his music asks to be judged by its own standards, and probably the only person adequately qualified to say anything intelligent in this regard is Elliott Carter himself. Still, that's never stopped me before, and it's not going to now. Having lived with this disc for some time, here's the bottom line: not all of this music is equally good, but some if it is really enjoyable.


Shard, for solo guitar, is a zippy and appealing little two and a half minute trifle that, as the title implies, sounds like a piece of something bigger, but one with an edge to it. That something bigger (and edgier) turns out to be Luimen (the title is Dutch and means "whimsical moods"), of which Shard comprises the third of four continuous sections, albeit with additional instrumental commentary. The word "whimsical" aptly describes Luimen, and any composer worth his salt better have his tongue in his cheek when writing for an ensemble consisting of trumpet, trombone, harp, mandolin, guitar, and vibraphone. Why does Carter's style work so well here? Well, first of all, traditional tonality would almost inevitably force a composer into well-worn melodic and harmonic pathways hardly suited to such an unequal and strange assortment of instruments. The result would probably sound merely foolish, whereas Carter's music, with its layered approach to complex rhythms and other simultaneous musical happenings celebrates and exploits the timbral potential of just such an unbalanced instrumental grouping. Take for example the work's second section, in which lovely soft chords from muted brass, harp and vibraphone serve as a background to sudden plucks from the mandolin and guitar, or the very end of the whole work, which is exquisitely timed to produce a really humorous effect. In short, this piece delivers the goods, and does so with a smile.


The same, alas, can't be said for Tempo e tempi, a song cycle set to various Italian poems and scored for voice, oboe/English horn, clarinet/bass clarinet, violin, and cello. Here the means must be at least somewhat more traditional because the point of any song cycle is the expressive enhancement of the text through music (which is the not the same thing as mere musical illustration, mind you). Three of the songs, "A Dove", with its softly warbling clarinet, "Sunken Oboe" (the musical potential is obvious), and "The Poet's Secret", with its luminous accompaniment, accomplish this goal. The remaining five, whatever private meaning they may hold for the composer, sound as if he could have been setting excerpts from the Manhattan yellow pages, for all their expressive specificity. He's also let down by a recording that places everyone, including soprano Susan Narucki, too close to the microphones, resulting in flat aural perspectives and tonal monotony (though everything else on this disc sounds great). And let's face it, you really can't place any work with lots of solo oboe (no matter how fine the player) far enough away from the microphones, can you?


That leaves us with the celebrated Eight Pieces for Four Timpani. This seminal work, beloved of percussionists, belongs as much in the practice room as it does in the concert hall. Carter himself requests that no more than four of these brief studies ever be played at one time, recognizing the potential for aural fatigue. Daniel Druckman accommodates their metrical and polyrhythmic complexities with virtuoso flair, and he's recorded clearly enough so that the music never turns into mud. Curiously, their interest being primarily rhythmic, these pieces make pretty easy listening for anyone who enjoys virtuoso drumming or music with a certain primal quality. Our Western tradition is filled with works in which an amazing sophistication of technique evokes ancient or primitive ritual music (think of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring or Les Noces, Varèse's Amériques, Ginastera's Popol Vuh, or Cage's Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano), and Carter's timpani pieces fall squarely into this tradition, however personal the actual idiom.


So there you have it! Now well into his 90s, Carter continues to write challenging, stimulating music, and to enjoy the enthusiastic support and loyalty of a tremendously talented group of musicians, not least the members of Speculum Musicae. The fact that he employs a highly evolved and complex personal style with limited broad appeal should not, in the final analysis, excuse anyone--supporters, detractors, or even music critics (who ideally should belong to neither category)--from taking each work as it comes and giving it due consideration accordingly. I may be wrong, but I seriously doubt he'd want it any other way. It should also come as no surprise that not everything he writes is equally good. After all, he may be the Grand Old Man of the American avant-garde, but in all other respects he's only human, and so is his music when you come right down to it. [3/4/2002]
--David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com