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.