Elliott Carter, 1908-2012

[Wendell_E]

Well, since I'm talking to myself here, I might as well go on ...

I'm sure Franco and I aren't the only ones listening.  I pre-ordered it from amazon.com, so I'll have to wait a week or so to hear it.

[Spotswood]

I pre-ordered it from amazon.com, so I'll have to wait a week or so to hear it.

You can also order it directly from bridgerecords.com now, and they'll get it to you within two days. They also don't charge shipping, so you'll save a couple bucks. Of course, you're probably not as impatient as I was.

Anyway, we're supposed to be snowed in this weekend, which will be a good opportunity to explore the entire set.

[Wendell_E]

You can also order it directly from bridgerecords.com now, and they'll get it to you within two days. They also don't charge shipping, so you'll save a couple bucks. Of course, you're probably not as impatient as I was.

I checked, and I would save $1.50, but I'm feeling too lazy to do the cliking involved for that small an amount.  I will keep it in mind when the record and release volume 9.   

[Spotswood]

Matthew Guerrieri gives a lucid and detailed account of Mr. Carter's new Flute Concerto here.

[Spotswood]

According to Boosey, the Concertino for Bass Clarinet and Chamber Orchestra is in fact finished. It was indeed written for Virgil Blackwell. No word on length or planned perormances. Scoring as follows (I'm sure karl will be happy to decode):

Concertino for Bass Clarinet and Chamber Orchestra (2009)
Scoring
solo bass clarinet--2(I=picc, II=afl).afl(=bass fl).0.0.cbn--0.0.0.0--perc(2):xyl/vib/log dr/tam-t/tom-t/SD/sus.cym/flat gong/conga/bongos; glsp/mar/BD/tom-t/totos/SD/sus.cym/temple blocks/pipe--pft--strings

[Spotswood]

Oh, and there's also this:

What Are Years (2009) 12'
for soprano and ensemble

Music Text 
Marianne Moore (E)

Scoring
1(=picc).2.corA.bcl(=cbcl).2--perc(2)--harp--strings(min.2/2/2/2/2)

World Premiere
6/26/2010
Snape Maltings Concert Hall, Aldeburgh
Claire Booth, soprano / Ensemble intercontemporain / Pierre Boulez

[karlhenning]

According to Boosey, the Concertino for Bass Clarinet and Chamber Orchestra is in fact finished. It was indeed written for Virgil Blackwell. No word on length or planned perormances. Scoring as follows (I'm sure karl will be happy to decode) . . . .

two flutes, one of which doubles on piccolo, the other doubles on alto flute
alto flute, doubling on bass flute
[ no oboes or clarinets ]
contrabassoon

[ no brass ]

two percussionists

piano

strings

[Spotswood]

[no oboes or clarinets ] [no brass ]

I was wondering what all the zeros were.

[karlhenning]

Always glad to be of any service, Joe.

[Spotswood]

Always glad to be of any service, Joe.

Well, my car is covered with salt ...

[karlhenning]

Hose it down.

[Spotswood]

Still aglow from last night's premiere of Nine by Five, Carter's brand-new wind quintet, performed at Paul Hall in New York City. This was old Carter, with much of the same aggressiveness, energy and extreme contrasts found in the great chamber works of the 1970s, such as the String Quartet No. 3 and the Brass Quintet. It runs about ten minutes. I don't hesitate to call it a major work, but, as I might be guilty of grade inflation where Mr. Carter is concerned, I should point out that Bruce Hodges and the Lisa Hirsch, my companions for the evening, also got a charge out of it. (The fact that we were sitting in the third row surely added to the physical impact of the music.)

The title refers to the number of players (five) and the number of instruments (nine). Everyone except the horn player double on a high and low instrument: flute-piccolo, bassoon-contrabassoon, Bb-Eb clarinet, oboe-English horn. (We counted ten instruments, actually: Charles Neidich played three clarinets, but I think he was using two E-flats, for obscure reasons of his own. Or maybe he used an A-flat in some passages because he found it easier. I couldn't tell. Karl could have told us.) The extreme contrasts are established at the beginning, with a forte blast in which the contrabassoon and the piccolo are prominent, playing at the ends of their ranges.
The New York Woodwind Quintet played the piece twice  — once at the end of each half of the program. An exhilarating work, the highlight of an exhilarating evening that included Carter early pieces for winds: The Eight Etudes and a Fantasy and the 1948 Woodwind Quintet. It was a treat to hear these attractive pieces live again. Carter has been unstoppable in the past few years, and with all the premieres, we haven't been hearing the older works as much as we might.

Twenty-four student wind players from Juilliard also crowded the stage for Wind Rose, Carter study in color and sonority from 2008. Nedi conducted. Bruce called it the least Carterian piece he has ever heard (this and his Sound Fields have been compared to Morton Feldman), but I find the same effects foreshadowed in the Etudes.
The one non-Carter piece was the Quintette by Jean Francaix, whom Carter knew as a fellow student of Boulanger. Carter suggested it by way of contrast with his own music. In his conversation onstage with Ara Guzeliman, he said it's the sort of piece he said Boulanger liked —  much in the manner of Poulenc. And it was quite charming. Unfortunately, the concert was running long, and the New Yorkers played only the first movement.
The odd man out in all of these wind pieces was the Tre Duetti for cello and violin, played by Rolf Schulte and Fred Sherry. It consisted of the Due Duetti, which Sherry and Schulte have already recorded for Bridge, with a new Adagio, a world premiere, stuck between them for contrast. It breaks the continuity: Carter intentionally begins the Duettino with the same gesture that ends the Duettone. Still, the Adagio is pretty little respite, and played together (they can also be played separately), the three pieces gain substance. They sound like half a string quartet.

[Spotswood]

PS: I've posted a query on Neidich's Web site, asking about the three clarinets. Maybe we'll have an answer in a day or two, unless some omniscient New York critic figures it out first.

[karlhenning]

Cool. Keep us posted.

[Spotswood]

Alan Kozinn reviews the Carter concert here. It doesn't recapture the elation of the event for me.  He doesn't explain the Mystery of the Third Clarinet, and there's that word "spiky" again.

It should be a drinking game --- take a shot every time a critic uses the words "spiky," "astringent," or "acerbic" to describe Mr. Carter's music.

[Spotswood]

Got an e-mail from Charles Neidich regrading the appearance of the third clarinet:

The reason I played an A clarinet briefly is that Elliott Carter wrote one low Eb (concert Db) a half 
step low for the Bb clarinet. Boosey&Hawkes, however, had only 
prepared a Bb part and I didn't want to trouble Elliott Carter to ask 
for a part in A plus I didn't have time myself to make an A part, so I 
found where I could quickly switch to A clarinet in time to play the 
low Eb which, as it turned out, was a very important note. Carter's 
music is so well written that playing the Eb an octave higher made no 
sense. In the future, the clarinet part will be for clarinet in A.

Karl, can you translate?

[Spotswood]

Oh, and he added this: ... spiky, ascerbic etc. are stock descriptions which make me 
question whether Kozinn was actually listening to the music.

[karlhenning]

Got an e-mail from Charles Neidich regrading the appearance of the third clarinet:

The reason I played an A clarinet briefly is that Elliott Carter wrote one low Eb (concert Db) a half 
step low for the Bb clarinet. Boosey&Hawkes, however, had only 
prepared a Bb part and I didn't want to trouble Elliott Carter to ask 
for a part in A plus I didn't have time myself to make an A part, so I 
found where I could quickly switch to A clarinet in time to play the 
low Eb which, as it turned out, was a very important note. Carter's 
music is so well written that playing the Eb an octave higher made no 
sense. In the future, the clarinet part will be for clarinet in A.

Karl, can you translate?

The lowest note on the clarinet is written E.  On the B-flat clarinet, this note sounds a concert D.  The A clarinet is slightly longer than the B-flat, and that lowest note sounds a concert C# (or D-flat).  In his score Carter assigned the clarinet that D-flat . . . so that whoever at Boosey prepared the part ought to have provided Neidich a part transposed for use on the A clarinet (on which Neidich can play that lowest note).

Hope this 'translation' is of service . . . .

[Spotswood]

Hope this 'translation' is of service . . . .

Well, I knew what it meant. I was thinking of others ... 

[Spotswood]

From Composers Datebook, forwarded by a friend of mine:

Sent: Wednesday, February 17, 2010 2:04:18 AM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern
Subject: Composers Datebook for February 17, 2010

Composers Datebook from American Public Media


Carter times Three

Listen to Today's Show:
http://www.elabs7.com/ct.html?rtr=on&s=fj6,k3zp,dv,jr6j,epk7,9iow,2tc6

How to listen: http://www.elabs7.com/ct.html?rtr=on&s=fj6,k3zp,dv,5mq3,fe78,9iow,2tc6


The American composer Elliott Carter has a reputation for writing some of the thorniest, most abstract and most technically difficult orchestral scores of the 20th century.


But for a few moments at least, during the opening of Carter's "Symphony of Three Orchestras," which had its premiere performance on today's date in 1977 at a New York Philharmonic concert conducted by Pierre Boulez, audiences must have been surprised by an impressionistic, almost Romantic tone.


In notes for the new piece, Carter admitted the opening of the new work was inspired by the poetry of Hart Crane, specifically Crane's description of the New York harbor and the Brooklyn Bridge. Both those New York landmarks were a short walk away from Carter's lower Manhattan apartment in 1977.


Carter's 15-minute "Symphony of Three Orchestras" quickly shifts into his more recognizably dense style, however, and, as the title indicates, employs three orchestras on one stage, playing with and against each other at various points.


As The New York Times reviewer wrote: "Mr. Carter has never made concessions to his listeners. The dissonances are Ivesian, with everything coming together in the end in smashing volleys of shrieking sound. It will take many hearings for the relationships of the score to assert themselves, though one can be confident that Mr, Carter, one of the most accomplished constructionists of the age, has assembled everything with pin-point logic."

--------------------------------------------------------------

Music Played on Today's Program:

Elliot Carter (b. 1908):
Symphony for Three Orchestras
New York Philharmonic;
Pierre Boulez, cond.
Sony 68334

Thorny --- there's another word for the drinking game. I'd rather they had quoted Andrew Porter's review in the New Yorker instead of the Times. Porter was much more sensitive to the work's beauties. The "shrieking," for example, is more accurately descrobed as "fortes." Beethoven used them, too.

I was at the premiere of A Symphony of Three Orchestras in 1977, though not the first performance. Feb. 17 as a Thursday. I think I went to the Saturday performance. I was 19 years old. Last week, 33 years later almost to the day, I attended another Carter premiere in NYC.

I'm in a terrible rut.