Elliott Carter, 1908-2012

[springrite]

I am currently in discussion with people of influence to make Eliott Carter the theme of the 2008 Beijing Contemporary Music Festival which coincide with Carter's 100th birthday. Not sure if it can be pulled off, but several people seem very interested and supportive of the idea.

IF (a big IF, I know) it happens, will some of you come to Beijing? 

[Joe Barron]

IF (a big IF, I know) it happens, will some of you come to Beijing? 

Ordinarily, I'd say no, but this morning, I heard on the radio that someone in Scotland paid $170,000 at a charity auction to attend a Led Zepplin reuinion concert. So, it would seem, I am not the biggest, most foolish, most spendthrift fanatic on the planet. After that, anything I do will seem perfectly reasonable. So yes, if I can make it, I will.

[Joe Barron]

BTW, nice review from Anthony Tomassini in today's Times. He's says what I said much better than I could say it.

6 Characters in Search of a Dimension, in Different Operatic Tempos            
By ANTHONY TOMMASINI
Published: December 10, 2007

Though Elliott Carter is an indisputably towering figure in contemporary music, few would have pegged him as a composer with a knack for opera. He attended operas for decades, but selectively. He did not pay heed to "La Bohème" until he was nearly 70 and left the show unimpressed.

That was then. Around the age of 90 he turned to opera in his own uncompromising way. He found a sympathetic librettist in the music critic Paul Griffiths (a former colleague of mine, who contributed reviews to The New York Times for several years). The opera that resulted was "What Next?," a 40-minute, one-act work, which had its premiere at the Deutsche Staatsoper in Berlin in 1999.

It is an existential comedy about six people, survivors (or victims?) of an auto accident, who struggle to make sense of what has happened to them and how they are related to one another, if at all. There is an engrossing ECM recording of the piece, recorded during a performance in Amsterdam in 2000.

But "What Next?" must be seen to be appreciated fully. On Friday night the opera had its New York stage premiere at the Miller Theater, a production directed by Christopher Alden, with Jeffrey Milarsky conducting a terrific cast and the excellent 38-piece Axiom ensemble. In this imaginative staging and gripping performance "What Next?" emerges as a theatrically dynamic and, finally, quite poignant music drama. The last performance, on Tuesday night, falls on Mr. Carter's 99th birthday.

What changed in Mr. Carter's career to lead him to opera so late? For one thing, starting in the mid-1970s, he re-embraced vocal music, composing a series of remarkable works. In addition, in the last 15 years or so, he has made his language more lucid and accessible without compromising the multilayered complexity of his music. Multiple overlapping elements still jostle and engage one another, at different tempos and seemingly in different dimensions. But the textures are thinned out; not quite so many things happen at once as in earlier pieces.

Also, Mr. Carter has increasingly found ways to compose with bracing economy, as five shorter solo and chamber pieces played by musicians from Axiom — like "Au Quai" (2002), for bassoon and viola (Justin Brown and Nadia Sirota) — demonstrated in the first half of the program. Just as in those compact works, Mr. Carter gets a lot of music into his brief opera.

"What Next?" begins with a volley of percussion to convey the clanking, steely, rhythmically jagged noises of a car crash. Andrew Cavanaugh Holland's set depicts a traffic underpass, with curved walls of oddly clean white tiles and a tangle of huge plastic roadway dividers in the center. There we meet the stunned characters. Rose (the agile and appealing soprano Amanda Squitieri), is a bride and stage performer in high heels and a sequined top. Harry or Larry (that's his name) is a bridegroom and also a clown (Morgan Smith, a hardy baritone), who busies himself pointlessly with a fishing pole.

Zen (Matthew Garrett, a husky-toned tenor) is a seer, though he seems the most befuddled of all in his frumpy suit and shoulder bag crammed with papers. Stella (the rich mezzo-soprano Katherine Rohrer), an astronomer, is all seriousness with thick-rimmed glasses, though she makes no sense. You count on Mama (the luminous, compelling soprano Susan Narucki), who looks so trustworthy in her sensible brown coat, to sort things out. There is also the Kid, a small but critical role (Jonathan Makepeace, a charming boy alto), who is engrossed with a hand-held computer game and seems the least rattled of the group.

There is much fanciful and poetic writing in Mr. Griffiths's libretto, including Gertrude Steinian touches: "A spider in the lane is a spider in the lane," says Harry or Larry. Mr. Carter's Modernist musical language may be audaciously complex, but the sheer visceral impact, endless variety and myriad colorings make it effectively dramatic. The vocal parts, full of skittish leaps, are daunting to sing. Amid the fitfulness are tender episodes, wistful, dusky, harmonically tart passages that seem to comfort the characters, as when the sad mother, recalling her home, with its well-stocked refrigerator, sings: "The boiler below like the engine of our little ship/carrying us safely nowhere else/which is where we all wanted to be."

Soon it seems apparent that these six characters have died, which is why they are struggling to figure out their new surroundings and cannot quite retrieve their pasts. Two silent road workers arrive to clear away the clutter, and they neither see nor hear the victims. At the end, after a chaotic ensemble, all except the Kid shuffle offstage, bunched in a pack, facing the audience, as in those comic ensembles in Rossini when the action stops and characters wonder aloud what is going on. Left alone on stage, the Kid says, "What —— ." Just that.

What next? That's the big question this little opera grapples with so affectingly.

[karlhenning]

. . . this morning, I heard on the radio that someone in Scotland paid $170,000 at a charity auction to attend a Led Zeppelin reunion concert.

Maybe he really, really wanted to support that charity . . . .

[bhodges]

BTW, nice review from Anthony Tomassini in today's Times. He's says what I said much better than I could say it.

Well, at least you mentioned the other, smaller works!  His review is excellent, but he doesn't discuss the first half much, and I thought in its own way it was just as strong as the opera.  (I went on Friday, and alas, was ill yesterday and couldn't join Joe.)

The performances were really strong.  Susan Narucki...what a voice she has.  And I overheard someone behind me say about the opera, "How are they able to even play that--it's so difficult!"

PS, on Friday night, pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard was in the audience, and was posing with Carter for photos afterward.

--Bruce

[Joe Barron]

Paul Griffiths, the librettist, sat at the end of my aisle, four seats away. I spoke to him briefly during intermission. He was impressed with Fulmer's performance of the violin fantasy, as I was, and said he liked the production of his opera, too. He said it really came together. Afterwards, I told him I prefer the piece on stage. He was about to say, "Yes, it makes a lot more sense," but he swallowed the last word when he realized that senselessness is sort of the point.   

The performances were really strong.  Susan Narucki...what a voice she has.  And I overheard someone behind me say about the opera, "How are they able to even play that--it's so difficult!"

It's a legitmate question. For me, playing is not the problem, since the musicians have the score and a conductor in front of them, but I do remember wondering how the performers remembered which pitches to sing. It's not like Mozart, where you start on one note and follow the key signature. But then, professionals have been pushing the envelope for centuries. I would think Wagner is tough to memorize, too.

Just a great time.

[Joe Barron]

Maybe he really, really wanted to support that charity . . . .

Tickets are also selling on eBay for $800. No charity there.

[karlhenning]

Maybe they're establishing a fund for Widows of Hard-Partying Drummers .

It could feature in the sequel to This is Spinal Tap

[Joe Barron]

Now that the site is back up, I can wish Happy Carter Day to all my friends at CMG. Today, Dec. 11, 2007, is Mr. Carter's 99th birthday, and a year's worth of centennial celebrations is about to begin. I'm lookng forward to hearing a lot of great music in the coming months, as well as a few premieres.

I'm told Mr. Carter will attend tonight's performance of What Next? at the Miller Theater. Unfortunately, I can't make it to New York on a Tuesday, though Sunday's performance was enough to hold me for a while. Bruce Hodges is planning to be there, if he's feeling better, and around 8 p.m. I'll be thinking of him with envy.  0:)

Not sure how I'll be celebrating this evening when I get home. Maybe I'll listen to both my versions of the Cello Concerto, as I promised myself I would do.

[bhodges]

I'll be there tonight!  And I've heard from some ten or twelve others who will be as well.  Miller Theatre is apparently close to selling out.

I put up a modest tribute, here.

--Bruce

[bhodges]

Last night's final performance of What Next? was quite a party.  Miller Theatre's capacity is 688, and every seat was taken for Carter's 99th birthday.  I have been to Miller many times but have never seen such a huge crush of people, with many waiting for ticket returns.

The program was even better a second time around.  I especially liked Au Quai (2002) for the unlikely combo of viola and bassoon, and the six players who plunged into Luimen (1997, for the even more unusual combination of trumpet, trombone, vibraphone, mandolin, guitar and harp) were fantastic.

But the opera was no doubt the centerpiece.  Joe Barron has waxed on about it earlier so I won't replay his excellent comments, but suffice to say that it repaid a second hearing.  Jeffrey Milarsky, the conductor, got a huge ovation after eliciting terrific work from everyone, especially the huge orchestra in the pit. 

And after the cast took their bows, they launched into "Happy Birthday," and the entire crowd stood and sang along, as Carter (helped by Paul Griffiths) smiled and faced the audience.  A truly memorable evening. 

--Bruce

[Joe Barron]

Luimen (1997, for the even more unusual combination of trumpet, trombone, vibraphone, mandolin, guitar and harp) [was] fantastic.

Unusual, but inspired. As I've pointed out in the past, the breathing, sustained tones of the brass provide a contrast and underpinning to the short noteds of the plucked strings.The vibraphone, the vibraphone, with its ability to reverberate after the mallet hits the key, falls between the two groups in terms of sonority. Something else you might not know about Luimen— the solo guitar piece "Shard" appears, in its entirety, about two thirds of the way through the piece.

Bruce, I knew I was going to be jealous of you. Was there cake and champagne afterward?

[bhodges]

Unusual, but inspired. As I've pointed out in the past, the breathing, sustained tones of the brass provide a contrast and underpinning to the short noteds of the plucked strings.The vibraphone, the vibraphone, with its ability to reverberate after the mallet hits the key, falls between the two groups in terms of sonority. Something else you might not know about Luimen— the solo guitar piece "Shard" appears, in its entirety, about two thirds of the way through the piece.

Bruce, I knew I was going to be jealous of you. Was there cake and champagne afterward?

Alas, no cake or champagne.  (They would have had to provide it for almost 700 people, so I'm not surprised!)  I did wonder afterward what Carter did yesterday, i.e., how he celebrated.  (Just having dinner with Paul Griffiths would have been enough for me.)

--Bruce

[springrite]

I did wonder afterward what Carter did yesterday, i.e., how he celebrated. 

Well, I assume he did NOT spend part of the day composing.

[(poco) Sforzando]

I was there too, and joined in the singing of Happy Birthday and the standing ovation to this extraordinary musical thinker. (Can't speak for the cake and champagne, as I left right afterwards.) But contrary to the above opinions, the high points of the evening were for me the five instrumental miniatures played in the first half. These were absolutely exquisite, especially "Remembering Roger" as dazzling played from memory by David Fulmer, "Au Quai" which continues the age-old tradition of the Bassoon as Clown, and the longer, thoroughly absorbing "Luimen" for guitar, mandolin, harp, vibraphone, trumpet, and trombone.

I first heard "What Next?" in a CSO concert at Carnegie Hall some five years ago, when Daniel Barenboim paired it rather incongruously with Falla's ballet of The Three-Cornered Hat. I did not find it especially gripping or convincing then, and seeing it last night (despite superb performances and productions values) did not change my opinion. The real problem is the libretto, which Paul Griffiths has used to create a static situation where six characters, apparently victims of an accident, bicker, squabble, and bicker some more until the Kid, the only person on stage who is mildly sympathetic and believable (and who seems to find the other five characters as much a pain in the ass as I did) ends the play by asking "What?" But squabbling and bickering are not dramatic in themselves, unless there is some kind of conflict or action that creates a need for resolution. If you compare a roughly similar drama, Sartre's No Exit (which more wisely restricts the action to three well-developed characters rather than Griffiths's sketchily realized six), you get a situation where Garçin has to make a decision - to demand the door of the locked room be opened, in which case neither he nor the two women have the courage to leave. What's more, this action is led up to by Garçin's being goaded by Inès and Estelle.

Griffiths's characters are by contrast more passive, and what's more their dialogue is irritatingly pretentious. We get an astronomer who recites names of planets, a typically vain operatic soprano, an annoying mother, and two men I can remember little about. In this staging, at one point the astronomer scrawls odd designs on what looks like the interior of a New York City vehicular tunnel, and then she smears them off. Why? Just some more silly pretentious business, I guess. When thinking of this libretto I couldn't help recall Mark Twain's "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses," where he states among other things that in a credible work of fiction:

- a tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere. But the "What Next?" tale accomplishes nothing and arrives in air.
- when the personages of a tale deal in conversation, the talk shall sound like human talk, and be talk such as human beings would be likely to talk in the given circumstances, and have a discoverable meaning, also a discoverable purpose, and a show of relevancy, and remain in the neighborhood of the subject at hand, and be interesting to the viewer, and help out the tale, and stop when the people cannot think of anything more to say. But this requirement has been ignored from the beginning of "What Next?" to the end of it.
- the author shall make the reader feel a deep interest in the personages of his tale and in their fate; and that he shall make the reader love the good people in the tale and hate the bad ones. But the viewer of "What Next?" dislikes the good people in it, is indifferent to the others, and wishes they would all get drowned together.

But why blame Carter for all this? After all, he didn't write the libretto. But as Joseph Kerman has argued in his famous book "Opera as Drama," in an opera the dramatist is the composer, and Griffiths's slender situation has given the composer little room to develop a persuasive operatic drama. All I hear are miscellaneous effects, with perhaps the most striking music per se being the instrumental interlude midway dominated by the English horn. An opera needs great music, but without a sound libretto it has no structure. (And by contrast, the libretto to - say- Il Trovatore, despite any absurdities, is a sound framework that gives Verdi ample opportunity to develop a musical drama, as well as characters who intensely involve the viewer.)

Carter does have a sense of drama, but his dramas have best been played out in such instrumental works as the Piano Concerto and the middle quartets. Or even little miniatures like Au Quai. On the basis of the feeble 40-minute stage work that dominated yesterday's event, I would say he has not yet shown a sense of operatic drama.

[Joe Barron]

Sforzando, your critique is well considered and your points well taken, and you're certainly not alone in your opinion. One Carter expert told me much the same things, though more concisely. "The libretto sucks," he said.

I can only repeat that I had a grand time, and the show kept my interest consistently. Yes, the characters are annoying, but so were the characters on Seinfeld. Griffiths recognized this when he got them offstage in the middle of the act. He calls the interlude "The Singing Stage" and says the music reflects the theater's relief at being rid of the characters for a time.

The male characters did make an impression on me, though they don't come off well as models of behavior. I remember thinking, whenever Zen dropped one his paradoxes, "Gee, what a big help." Stella's scribbling, as you call it, was calculus equations. She was an astronomer, and in this situation, in which everyone's memory was failing, she was retreating to the one thing that made sense to her, the one thing that gave her identity.

As for Mr. Twain's comments about dialogue, they are good standards to use when approaching a work of fiction, but as Pauline Kael said, standards are useful only as rules of thumb until you find yourself responding to a work that violates them. I found myself responding, and that's really all I can say. I certainly don't expect you to change your mind.

[Joe Barron]

Well, I assume he did NOT spend part of the day composing.

I'm assuming he did ... 

[karlhenning]

I'm assuming he did ... 

Could break either way, really.

Thanks, Sforzando, for voicing The Respectful Opposition 

[Joe Barron]

Well, now we know who will be playing the Cello Concerto next month:

From The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner

Young Fairbanks musician wins Juilliard School Concerto Competition
By Dermot Cole
Staff Writer
Published December 24, 2007

American composer Elliott Carter told an interviewer in 2001 that he wrote the complex score for "Elliott Carter's Cello Concerto" with cellist Yo-Yo Ma in mind.

The New York Times said the piece is "like a soliloquy for cello with orchestral commentary" that features "formidably complex rhythmic writing."

Carter, who just turned 99, is to be honored in February at the Focus! Festival in New York City with performances of his music.

Fairbanksan Dane Johansen, who is a graduate student at Juilliard, has been unanimously selected by a panel of judges to play Elliott Carter's Cello Concerto at the concluding concert of the festival.

Johansen won the Juilliard School Concerto Competition Dec. 14 and is to perform with the Juilliard Orchestra in Lincoln Center, conducted by James Levine, conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

The cello department at Juilliard has been "pleading for Carter's Cello Concerto as a competition piece," Joel Sachs of Juilliard wrote in the Juilliard Journal Online, but "no conductor had agreed to do it."

In part that is because not many cellists play this concerto. The total has roughly doubled recently because of Johansen and the other students who learned it to enter the Juilliard competition.

The son of Gail and Tony Johansen, Dane said he is very excited at the chance to work with Carter and Levine, two legends in American music. Carter is scheduled to attend rehearsals and the performance.

Johansen is finishing his master's degree in cello performance at Juilliard. He was 16 when he began studying at the Cleveland Institute of Music and has also received training at the National Conservatory in Paris.

He started learning the cello under the instruction of Peggy Swartz, who was one of the first Suzuki Method teachers in Alaska. He also studied in the Fairbanks School of Talent Education, the Fairbanks Youth Orchestras and the public school orchestras.

[karlhenning]

Joe, somehow I permitted the Clarinet Concerto / Symphonia: Sum Fluxae Pretium Spei to depart from our library (must have been Lean Times).  The concerto is not much longer by the clock than the Horn Concerto.

Really enjoying this disc; I don't know why it didn't click with me earlier.  One of life's imponderables.