Elliott Carter, 1908-2012

[Joe Barron]

YQW, Bruce.

A very nice piece, btw --- well written, as always. And that part about how Mr. Carter became prolific in his old age after "investing decades in the painstaking development of his mature style" --- it's just so so pithy. 0:)

I would add one disk to your list of recommendations, though: the Nonesuch recording of the Cello and Harpsichord sonatas and the Double Concerto. Other than that, I agree with all your selections.

[Joe Barron]

Finally! Joel Sachs has filled in the concert programs for Juilliard's All About Elliott festival in January. I think I'll be skipping the Monday and Tueday concerts. Most of the pieces are pretty small, and I can hear them all on CD.  Bruce has posted the first and last programs earlier on this thread.

The Jan. 31 and Feb. 1 concerts look good, though:  Piano Quintet, Brass Quintet and Harspichord Sonata. All great works, and I'll be interested to hear them played by students. Jan. 31 program also includes Call, a one-minute piece I haven't heard before.

Friday
January 25, 2008
8:00 PM FOCUS! 2008: ALL ABOUT ELLIOTT
Celebrating Elliott Carter's 100th Birthday.
Musicians from the New Juilliard Ensemble and the Lucerne Festival Academy, Pierre Boulez, conductor
Peter Jay Sharp Theater

Monday
January 28, 2008
8:00 PM FOCUS! 2008: ALL ABOUT ELLIOTT
Celebrating Elliott Carter's 100th Birthday
SEVEN CARTER WORKS
Canaries, Canto (1949)
Tomoya Aomori, timpani
Enchanted Preludes (1988)
Jeremiah Bills, flute; Jason Calloway, cello
Sonata for Cello and Piano (1948)
Emily Brausa, cello; Hiromi Fukuda, piano
Triology (1992)
Nicholas Stovall, oboe; Michelle Gott, harp
Riconoscenza (1984)
Francesca Anderegg, violin Rhapsodic Musings (2001)
Emilie-Anne Gendron, violin
Retrouvailles (2000) and Catenaires (2006)
Vassilis Varvaresos, piano
Peter Jay Sharp Theater


Tuesday
January 29, 2008
8:00 PM FOCUS! 2008: ALL ABOUT ELLIOTT
Celebrating Elliott Carter's 100th Birthday
FIVE CARTER WORKS
Three Poems of Robert Frost (1942/1980)
David McFerrin, baritone
Quintet for Piano and winds (1991)
Alexandra Lambertson, oboe; Bryan Conger, clarinet; Brigitte Bencoe, French horn; Joshua Firer, bassoon; Jacek Mysinski, piano
Asko Concerto (2000)
Tempo e tempi (1999)
Jennifer Zetlan, soprano
Asko Concerto (2000)
Peter Jay Sharp Theater


Thursday
January 31, 2008
8:00 PM FOCUS! 2008: ALL ABOUT ELLIOTT
Celebrating Elliott Carter's 100th Birthday
TEN CARTER WORKS
Call (2003)
Warble for Lilac-Time (1943/54)
Frederique Vezina, soprano; Jonathan Ware, piano
Voyage (1943)
Renee Tatum, mezzo-soprano; Jonathan Ware, piano
Esprit rude, esprit doux I (1984)
Esprit rude, esprit doux II, (1985)
Nadia Kyne, flute; Sean Rice, clarinet; Alexander Lipowski, marimba
Two Diversions (1999)
David Barry, piano Gra (1993)
Moran Katz, clarinet
Hiyoku (2001)
Moran Katz and Sean Rice, clarinets
Con leggerezza pensosa (1990)
David Fulmer, violin; Tibi Cziger, clarinet; Yves Dahramraj, cello
Quintet for Piano and Strings (1997)
Francesca Anderegg and David Fulmer, violins; Kyle Arbrust, viola; Caroline Stinson, cello; Matthew Odell, piano
Peter Jay Sharp Theater


Friday
February 1, 2008
8:00 PM FOCUS! 2008: ALL ABOUT ELLIOTT
Celebrating Elliott Carter's 100th Birthday
TEN CARTER WORKS
Elegy (1943), arranged for string quartet (1946)
Fragment 1 (1994)
Fragment 2 (1999)
Ann Miller and Nicole Jeong, violins; Luke Fleming, viola; Elisabeth Lara, cello
March (1949)
Saeta (1949)
Chihiro Shibayama, timpani
Sonata for Flute, Oboe, Cello, and Harpsichord (1952)
Chelsea Knox, flute; Jeffrey Reinhard, oboe; David Huckaby, cello; Alexandra Snyder, harpsichord
90+ (1994) Lisa Stepanova, piano
Figment (1994)
Figment 2 (2001)
Kye-Yong Sarah Kwon, cello
Brass Quintet (1974)
Chris Coletti and Alexander White, trumpets; Eric Read, French horn; Bradley Williams, trombone; Louis Bremer, bass trombone
Peter Jay Sharp Theater

Saturday
February 2, 2008
8:00 PM FOCUS! 2008: ALL ABOUT ELLIOTT
Celebrating Elliott Carter's 100th Birthday
Juilliard Orchestra, James Levine, conductor; cellist TBA

[bhodges]

Finally! Joel Sachs has filled in the concert programs for Juilliard's All About Elliott festival in January. I think I'll be skipping the Monday and Tueday concerts. Most of the pieces are pretty small, and I can hear them all on CD.  Bruce has posted the first and last programs earlier on this thread.

The Jan. 31 and Feb. 1 concerts look good, though:  Piano Quintet, Brass Quintet and Harspichord Sonata. All great works, and I'll be interested to hear them played by students. Jan. 31 program also includes Call, a one-minute piece I haven't heard before.

Thanks for posting this, Joe.  Unlike you (I think!) I haven't heard most of the smaller pieces during the week, so I'll probably try to go to most of them.  Just checked other schedules, and thankfully there aren't too many competing concerts going on that week.  FYI, there is this gem on Sunday afternoon, Jan. 27, at 5:00:

The MET Chamber Ensemble
James Levine, Artistic Director and Conductor
Anja Silja, Soprano
Gil Shaham, Violin
Yefim Bronfman, Piano

Webern: Symphony, Op. 21 
Webern: Concerto for Nine Instruments, Op. 24 
Berg: Chamber Concerto for Piano, Violin, and 13 Winds 
Schoenberg: Pierrot lunaire

--Bruce

[karlhenning]

FYI, there is this gem on Sunday afternoon, Jan. 27, at 5:00:

The MET Chamber Ensemble
James Levine, Artistic Director and Conductor
Anja Silja, Soprano
Gil Shaham, Violin
Yefim Bronfman, Piano

Webern: Symphony, Op. 21 
Webern: Concerto for Nine Instruments, Op. 24 
Berg: Chamber Concerto for Piano, Violin, and 13 Winds 
Schoenberg: Pierrot lunaire

Fantastic program, Bruce!

[bhodges]

Yep, won't me missing that one, for sure.  And I'm amazed how much voice Silja still has left.  She should be quite marvelous in Pierrot...

--Bruce

[Joe Barron]

Hey, if you're not talking about Carter, take it outside. 

[bhodges]

Hey, if you're not talking about Carter, take it outside. 

Well...perhaps Anja Silja will consider doing a Carter encore!



--Bruce

[Joe Barron]

Well...perhaps Anja Silja will consider doing a Carter encore!



--Bruce

Weak, man. Weak.   0:)

Here's a little preview for those of us (i.e., Bruce and Myself) attending this weekends performances at the Miller:

The Stand-Alone
Classical Music
BY GEORGE LOOMIS
December 6, 2007

URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/67610

When the composer Elliott Carter presented the world premiere of his first opera, the one-act "What Next?," at the Berlin Staatsoper in 1999, many critics were perplexed. Mr. Carter was 91 years old, had never written an opera, and was presenting his first with a literal bang — in the form of an automobile accident that started the show. So the question seemed to be, "what's next?"

The answer, however, was not another opera. Mr. Carter, now 98, never wrote another opera in the years following, and his lone, 40-minute work has become somewhat of a calling card. Beginning tomorrow, Miller Theatre will present the New York stage premiere of "What Next?" in a four-performance run; the final performance, on December 11, falls on Mr. Carter's 99th birthday.

As the revered composer himself recalled in a telephone conversation last week, the work was somewhat of a collaborative effort. "What Next?" might never have been written at all had it not been for the prodding of the conductor Daniel Barenboim. "He kept calling to ask, 'How is that opera coming?'" Mr. Carter said. "I knew he would do a good job with it at the Staatsoper."

Mr. Carter initially had trouble choosing a subject, but eventually found inspiration in the Jacques Tati movie "Traffic." "Finally I thought of one that everybody thinks about — an automobile accident!" For a librettist, Mr. Carter chose the music writer Paul Griffiths. "Paul is the one who decided on characters — a Zen Buddhist, a Lady astronomer, and so forth. One thing we had to do, since the opera starts with all the characters onstage, was get them offstage so they can make entrances, as in any opera. Otherwise there would be a lack visual variety."

"Elliott was insistent," Mr. Griffiths said, "that the opera have a quality of lightness. He wanted to have fun writing it and wanted the audience to have fun too." Mr. Griffiths also recalled that Mr. Carter wanted a rationale for having characters sing. "He didn't like the idea of someone just knocking on the door and saying, 'Hello, I'm Bill.' The accident in effect shocks them into singing.

"It also allows people to behave in strange and extravagant ways," Mr. Griffiths continued.

The director of the Miller Theatre production, Christopher Alden, likened the work to a play by Samuel Beckett. "It's open-ended about what has happened and why they are together," he said. "They're trying to relate to each other and make sense of existence in the face of catastrophe." "It's less literal than a typical opera, more poetic," he said. "It allows the audience to bring its own perspective."

Mr. Alden, who is known for his radical stagings, said that his approach to an unfamiliar work is not especially different from his approach to a well-known opera. In Mr. Alden's production, the action takes place in a tunnel. "Like the Holland Tunnel," he explained, "with overturned road barriers — an existential environment."

Though the opera's truncated length is due in part to the elderly composer's resistance to working on an evening-length piece, he has remained prolific in the decade since writing the opera. His most recent composition, his Horn Concerto, was given its world premiere by the Boston Symphony Orchestra just last month.

The Miller Theatre production will be the opera's fourth staging, but it has enjoyed 20 concert performances, including one in New York by Mr. Barenboim and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 2000.

Normally, "What Next?" has been paired with another opera; a recent Munich production presented it with Puccini's "Gianni Schicchi." For the New York performances, the executive director of the Miller Theatre, George Steel, chose to preface it with what he called a "garland" of Carter chamber works played by various members of the opera orchestra.

And, though it may be short, the opera compensates for its length with an unusual richness of detail. "It's crammed full of specific moments," Mr. Alden marveled, "with as many dramatic beats as you'd find in a whole Wagner opera."

I like the comparison to the Beckett play. In the years before What Next? was written and we were all wondering if Carter would ever write an opera, I often said something by Beckett would be appropriate. I thought "Play," in which the characters  run through the text twice, would have been a good challenge, since Carter never repeats himself in a piece. Each setting of the text would have been different, bringin out different meanings and emphases in the words..

[bhodges]

Thanks for that, Joe, which I probably would have missed.  PS, as an aside, when I mention the plot premise to people, at least three have asked if it's similar to Crash, the Cronenberg film!  I said I didn't think there was much sex in Carter's opera (but of course I haven't seen it yet).

--Bruce

[Joe Barron]

Thanks for that, Joe, which I probably would have missed.  PS, as an aside, when I mention the plot premise to people, at least three have asked if it's similar to Crash, the Cronenberg film!  I said I didn't think there was much sex in Carter's opera (but of course I haven't seen it yet).

When I wrote my term paper for opera class on What Next? I described the scene in the Tati film that inspired the libretto. It's a slapstick accident in the tradition of the Keystone Cops,  involving more than a dozen cars. No one gets hurt, but everyone is stunned for a few seconds afterward. They get out of their cars slowly, as though in a daze, before they  getto work trying to repair the damage and get back on the road---in odd ways. Carter described it as "everyone acting crazy." There's a priest, for instance, who kneels beside his car and holds up his tire iron like a crucifix.

Carter has also talked about seeing an accident in Italy in which invetigators and started taking measurements at the scene while the victims were stil lying in the street. It seemed callous surreal to him, and it suggested  the episode  the bit opera in which the  characters try to make contact with a group of workers, only to be ignored.

[bhodges]

All most interesting.  (I haven't seen the Tati film, Traffic, either, although I'm familiar with some of his others.)

--Bruce

[Joe Barron]

All most interesting.  (I haven't seen the Tati film, Traffic, either, although I'm familiar with some of his others.)

Rather late for him. It was made in color, and there is a reference to the moon landing. Interestingly, Carter and Tati were born the same year.

[Wendell_E]

There's a fairly lengthy audio interview (I've been listening for over 15 minutes, and it hasn't ended yet) with Carter and Adam Wasserman at the Opera News website.  I thought you might have to be a subscriber or Met Opera Guild Member to access it, but I tried it after logging out, and was still able to get there.  He talks about how he came to write What Next?, opera in general, his young days in Paris and Germany, what sort of music he listens to now, etc.

http://www.metoperafamily.org/operanews/issue/article.aspx?id=3428&issueID=155

[bhodges]

Many thanks, Wendell! 

--Bruce

[Wendell_E]

Towards the end (the whole interview's a bit over 19 minutes), he talks about a possible Flute Concerto:  "Many people have been asking me to write a Flute Concerto of some kind and I think I finally will, though I'm not sure I'm going to do that..."  C'mon man, just do it!   

[bhodges]

Towards the end (the whole interview's a bit over 19 minutes), he talks about a possible Flute Concerto:  "Many people have been asking me to write a Flute Concerto of some kind and I think I finally will, though I'm not sure I'm going to do that..."  C'mon man, just do it!   

Yeah, I mean (with all due respect) I think he should downsize the agonizing, no doubt lengthy decision-making process. 

--Bruce

[Joe Barron]

Towards the end (the whole interview's a bit over 19 minutes), he talks about a possible Flute Concerto:  "Many people have been asking me to write a Flute Concerto of some kind and I think I finally will, though I'm not sure I'm going to do that..."  C'mon man, just do it!   

From what Karl and I learned last month at the BSO pre-concert talk, he is doing it, but then, I don't know the date of this interview relative to the announcment in Boston. He might have made up his mind, or he might be having second thoughts.

Thanks for the link, Wendell.

[Joe Barron]

 Wonderful article on Mr. C by Charles Rosen in todays Times:


December 9, 2007

An Old Master Still in Development
By CHARLES ROSEN

ELLIOTT CARTER, a celebrated figure on the international stage even before Georg Solti took his Variations for Orchestra to Europe with the Chicago Symphony in 1971, is the most respected and admired of American composers. Festivals devoted to his music have taken place in many cities, including London, Paris and Madrid.

And he is a prophet increasingly honored in his own country. Certain of his chamber works, especially the string quartets, have long been widely performed; less so, the orchestral works. But in recent years those too, though still uncompromisingly modernist, have been taken up around the country, championed above all by Pierre Boulez, Daniel Barenboim and James Levine.

On Friday Mr. Carter's only opera, "What Next?," had its New York stage premiere, beginning a run of performances that ends on Tuesday, his 99th birthday.

Looking younger every year, and more creative than ever, Mr. Carter is a genial, mild-mannered and unassuming man, extraordinarily cultivated, with a deep interest in art and literature as well as the entire history of music. Perhaps the most striking aspects of his character are a self-confidence and a lack of pretension, a rare combination. Even in the last few years his style has continued to develop, in a series of works that seem to become ever more immediately approachable without renouncing the individuality of his style.

I first met Elliott Carter in 1956 at a concert of the International Society for Contemporary Music, held at what used to be called Carnegie Recital Hall (now Weill Recital Hall). Or rather, we met after the concert. One generally went to the society's concerts to see friends; only a small amount of the music played there was attractive, since most contemporary music, like most of the music of any other period of history, is of little interest. On this occasion, if I remember correctly, one work was a single note on a solo violin to be sustained for 1 hour 20 minutes (but the performance was abbreviated to 40 minutes).

I knew several composers, and afterward we all went out to the Carnegie Tavern, now long gone but then on the corner of Seventh Avenue and 56th Street. Aaron Copland, Milton Babbitt, Arthur Berger and others were there, and I found myself sitting next to Elliott, whom I had never met but whose Piano Sonata I was then working on. I needed a grand and substantial American piece for a tour of Germany sponsored by the United States Information Service, which was trying to prove to Europeans how cultured Americans were. Elliott's sonata was the only avant-garde American work for piano after Ives that exploited the sound of the full-size concert piano with panache and even Romantic brilliance, and I was delighted with it, so I was pleased to meet the composer.

Copland, in an ebullient mood as he grandly paid for everybody's sandwich and beer, was due to appear on a late-night television talk show. Elliott said he had never been to a live television show, nor had I, so we both went to be in the audience and watch Copland discuss baseball, to show he was a regular guy and not just an intellectual classical musician. A few days later I was invited to dinner by Elliott's wife, Helen Carter. Elliott must have told her that I was presentable.

In 1961 Elliott invited me to play the solo piano in the premiere of the Double Concerto for harpsichord and piano at the Metropolitan Museum. Along with the First String Quartet and the Variations for Orchestra, this was Elliott's most ambitious work to date, calling for 2 orchestras of 6 musicians each, and 4 percussionists with 11 instruments each. It is a work of dazzling and original rhythm and sonority, with sound patterns that make arabesques in space and with a dramatic form that intricately opposes and combines different rhythmic worlds. (At one sensational moment the harpsichordist and all the other musicians gradually make an immense ritardando to a very slow tempo while the pianist speeds up to the point at which all the notes become a resonant blur.)

This work became immediately famous, partly because of Stravinsky's comment that at last we had an American masterpiece. But it was essentially a logical development of Elliott's musical thought that had started many years before, with the Sonata for Cello and Piano. Its first movement opens with the piano ticking away staccato in an absolutely regular metronomic beat while the cello has a rhapsodic and eloquent long melody that seems to exist in a rhythmic world of its own. The attempt to escape from a mechanical, simplistic and one-dimensional sense of time has been the most radical characteristic of Elliott's technique, together with the way he has tried to derive and shape the melodic material directly from the sonority of the different instruments.

By this time his style was largely his own. Unlike most of his contemporaries he never tried to compose in the 12-tone system, finding it absurdly constraining, although a copy of Schoenberg's Opus 25 Piano Pieces that he bought as a teenager on a trip to Vienna with his father was what stimulated his interest in music.

He received encouragement from Charles Ives, and like many other American composers of the late 1920s and '30s, he was firmly in the Stravinsky Neo-Classical camp and studied in France with Nadia Boulanger. In the late 1940s he freed himself from this stylistic dependence, although his individuality had already been apparent for some time.

Later influences on his work even include Mozart and Schumann. When I remarked to him on the originality of some virtuoso figuration in the Piano Concerto, Elliott just said, "Oh, that's like one of the Chopin études." So it is, but it sounds like Carter. As T. S. Eliot remarked, minor artists imitate, major artists steal. Of course they make what they steal their own.

Elliott was born in New York in 1908. His father, a wealthy importer of lace, disapproved of Elliott's choice of music as a profession and gave him no encouragement. Through much of his life his main support came from his wife, Helen, a brilliant woman who had been a sculptor and who was adored and feared by her many friends and admirers. She arranged everything firmly so that Elliott had the time and the peace of mind to work. They were happily and closely united for half a century until her death in 2003.

Even before a series of notable successes and his growing reputation had made Elliott's life much easier, he and Helen were extraordinarily generous in helping musicians. Elliott has been especially interested in the practical aspects of performing music since the 1940s, when he worked with and composed for George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein in what would eventually become the New York City Ballet. Above all Elliott has always been concerned to explore the capacities of each instrument and its special character, and many aspects of his work are inspired by this study.

Between the Cello Sonata and the Double Concerto, Elliott had made a breakthrough in his career with the lengthy String Quartet No. 1. Here, for the first time, as he has said, he allowed himself to write just the music that appealed to him, with no thought of audience or performer. Paradoxically the quartet quickly became his most popular work and was soon in the repertory of many string quartets. Pierre Boulez has remarked that he once thought that string quartet form was irretrievably old-fashioned but that Elliott's quartets had convinced him that something new and original could still be accomplished in it. More than any other composer Elliott made the string quartet into a dialogue and an adventure among four equal virtuosos.

For some time one of the attractions of Elliott's music may actually have been its difficulty: the challenge presented by his sense of time, which yields not cross-rhythms but cross-tempos, actions that seem to exist independently yet combine to create new syntheses. It is astonishing how many pianists, for example, have wanted to record as well as perform a difficult long work like "Night Fantasies," and how many quartets keep the string quartets as an essential part of their repertory.

But over the years this difficulty has largely dissipated. The music has become much easier to play, to listen to and to understand as it has entered into the general musical experience. Some of the works of composers he influenced now seem much more complex than his. Certain unreconstructed hard-core modernists are actually taken aback by the traditional eloquence that often appears in his work; one critic deplored Elliott's use of the classical score marking "espressivo."

Such moments of lyricism are remarkable in "What Next?," the one-act opera from 1998 now at the Miller Theater. It is clear that alongside all the innovative aspects of his technique, Elliott has never wanted to renounce the unashamed eloquence of the music of the past, which retains an essential role in his work. But there is also a certain reticence, an evasion of any final grandiloquence. None of his works, not even those with the grandest proportions, end with an emphatic bang; the last phrase is always the still, small voice.

Perhaps the most striking development in Elliott's style in the last three decades is the series of song cycles for solo voice and small chamber group. "A Mirror on Which to Dwell," a setting of Elizabeth Bishop poems from 1975, was followed by "Syringa," settings of John Ashbery, in 1978, and "In Sleep, in Thunder," settings of Robert Lowell, in 1981. Most delicate and exquisite of all is the Italian cycle of 1998 on poems by Eugenio Montale, Salvatore Quasimodo and Giuseppe Ungaretti, "Tempo e Tempi."

The creativity of recent decades has been extraordinary. Concertos for cello, for piano and for oboe register a new consideration of the sonority of each instrument; the power of invention appears to have become more immediate. And there is a series of imaginative short solo pieces and duos written for friends. In many of the latest productions, the most complex effects of his middle period reappear with a new economy and an easier conviction. So many composers develop a late style when they are about 50, but Elliott had to wait for his 80s to achieve his.

Yet those of us who are sure that his work is the finest and most moving musical inspiration of our time wonder what novel turns will be found in the new projects he continues to take up. What, indeed, is next?

Charles Rosen, a concert pianist, writes and lectures extensively on music.

[karlhenning]

Groovissimo!

[Joe Barron]

Just got back from NYC, where I saw the staging of What Next? at the Miller Theater. First off, to answer the question that's been on everyone's mind since the premiere: Yes, the piece does work as an opera. Until tonight I've known the work only through a concert performance and the recording. Reviews of the premiere at the Staatsoper Berlin were mixed. Most of the critics I read praised the music but found fault with Paul Griffiths' libretto, which, they said, wasn't sufficiently dramatic.

Perhaps it isn't. It does still strike me as repetitious. Mama talks too much about the wedding and the need to do something about the predicament, but in the Miller production, director Christopher Alden kept everything moving with plenty of stage business and physical contact between the characters, which, when coupled with Carter's concentrated, beautiful score, kept my attention from flagging, and at some points drew me forward on my seat. Near the beginning, whenever Mama mentioned the wedding, she threw a fistful of confetti. Zen went offstage momentarily to take whiz, and Harry or Larry kept fondling Stella's behind, which gave sense to her line "Piss off, you!" at the end. I was actually happy she said (or sang) it.

I quite liked the set, too. It was very spare, with white rectangular tiles and bright, square wall lamps meant to place us in the Holland Tunnel. One wall extended from stage left, then curved backwards parallel to the wall angling in from stage right, creating a natural exit. The only props were plastic barriers of white and orange and a Game Boy held by the kid.     

The singers were uniformly excellent, though the score gives the women more opportunity to shine. The sound of the small orchestra seemed exceptionally rich. I left my program back in the theater, and right now the only performer whose name I remember is Susan Narucki, who played Mama. She's a favorite of mine (see my review of When the Moon, her collection of Ives songs), and it was a treat to greet her after the performance.

Maybe it's my own Carterian prejudices talking, or my sense of the occasion, but honestly, I cannot remember when I've had such a good time at an opera, and I've seen quite a few.

The first half of the program consisted of five of Mr. Carter's short chamber pieces, cleverly arranged to fill the stage with musicians gradually. It started with a selection from the Four Lauds for solo violin, then continued with Esprit Rude, Esprit Doux for flute and clarinet and Au Quai for viola and bassoon, Con Leggerezza Pensosa for violin, cello and clarinet, and finally Luimen for six instruments. The musicians were all young and gave sensitive, colorful accounts of the music.

David Fulmer's performance of "Fantasy — Remembering Roger" from the Four Lauds represented something a milestone for me. It was the first time I can recall seeing any instrumentalist play a Carter piece from memory. An incisive, energetic performance, too.