This disc includes a conversation between Elliott Carter and Charles Rosen recorded in December 1996 at MasterSound Studios, Astoria, NYC (timing: 6'40").
This disc contains both DDD and ADD recordings.
"90+" was nominated for the 1999 Grammy Award for "Best Classical Contemporary Composition."
Elliot Carter has always been a composer for the cognoscenti, his music held to be well crafted and complicated. His early works are tonal and neo-classical, showing the influence of Stravinsky and teacher Nadia Boulanger. He progressed toward atonality and canonic textures, with extreme independence of voices his trademark. By the sixties when the proponents of post-serial complexity had reached the zenith of their powers in academic circles, Carter was often spoken of as America's leading composer.
The transitional Piano Sonata of 1947 is, with Ives' 'Concord Sonata' and Copland's 'Piano Variations,' an American keyboard classic. Like the latter work it is boldly declamatory and makes the most of the piano's metal with crashing sonorities and ringing harmonics. The 'Night Fantasies' of 1980 is wholly uncompromising, so difficult, one might add, that it took four pianists to commission it. There are no themes or motifs and relationships between rhythm and pitch groups are so long ranging and subtle that one could probably not discern them without careful study. Intellectual difficulty being pianist Charles Rosen's meat, he has no difficulty dispatching these works. The good analog recordings were made in Holland in 1982 and were originally released on Etcetera.
REVIEWS:
Village Voice (1/7/1998) - "...Rosen, a longtime Carter interpreter, finds the contrasts of touch and weight that pervade '90 Plus'...[in] 'Night Fantasies' [Rosen]emphasizes the [high-keyboard]dazzle...and surprising shifts...The Sonata...get[s] charming play..." Rating: A+
International Record Review (4/00) - "...As to Rosen's advocacy of [Carter's] nusic, it is both staggeringly precise and colouristically very sensitive. This recording deserves a place in the library of every musically literate person..."
Billboard (11/27/99, p.54) - Recommended