Elliott Carter, 1908-2012

[Joe Barron]

Al, I've enjoyed very much reading your posts on the Clarinet Concerto. I went went back this afternoon and listened to the piece for the first time since seeing Ismail Lumanovski perform it live in New York on January 28. That performance was so dazzling and satisfying that I felt no need to hear the thing again for a while. Your comparison to Coltrane is apt and telling. I now think of the piece as a "bop" concerto, as opposed to the Copland Clarinet Concerto, which I now define as "swing." I have a greater appreciation for it as a result, and I think I'm hearing it better now, too.

Carter has often spoken about jazz as an influence, though we don't think of many of his pieces as overtly jazzy. As a young man in the 1930s, he frequented jazz clubs where musicians such as Fats Waller played, and he was impressed by the way they would lay down a steady beat with the left hand and play more ornamental passages rubato with the right. Bop, free jazz and Carter himself have taken this idea much farther, of course.

I haven't listened to Coltrane giving away my LPs of his music, but this afternoon I ordered My Favorite Things and Blue Train on CD, so I may have more to say later.
   

[Al Moritz]

Al, I've enjoyed very much reading your posts on the Clarinet Concerto. I went went back this afternoon and listened to the piece for the first time since seeing Ismail Lumanovski perform it live in New York on January 28. That performance was so dazzling and satisfying that I felt no need to hear the thing again for a while. Your comparison to Coltrane is apt and telling. I now think of the piece as a "bop" concerto, as opposed to the Copland Clarinet Concerto, which I now define as "swing." I have a greater appreciation for it as a result, and I think I'm hearing it better now, too.   

Joe, I am glad that I seem to have been onto something. I listened to the concerto again, and it's awesome. Interestingly, the two slow movements, Tranquilo and Largo, contrast the faster ones with being something of nocturnal music, particularly the Tranquilo.

My only slight quibble is with the recording. While the sound is great, the balance does not seem quite right. I realize the producers wanted to make sure that the ensemble never overpowers the clarinet lines, but often I think the ensemble sounds too much in the background, which makes it hard to hear those lines. Also, I have the feeling, impressive as the dynamic range is, it is over-engineered. I cannot quite imagine that in reality the differences in loudness between the slow and fast movements actually lie within the dynamic range of the clarinet.

You have heard the work live, and thus have a good reference to judge the recording. What do you think? Is the recording balance closer to the live experience than I believe?

Al

[Guido]

I'm not Joe, but I thought I'd chime in.

Seeing the Clarinet concerto live at the Barbican in London with Collins on Clarinet and Knussen conducting was one of the best concert experiences of my life, if not the best. His playing was just unbelievable. Naturally the clarinet is more closely recorded in the recording, but he was as easy to hear in the performance I attended. An interesting feature of the piece was that he moved around the stage during the performance, each movement positioning himself nearer a different section of the orchestra. Understandably he played with music which he carried with him. I don't know if these movement are written in the score, but Carter was there so I assume it was all sanctioned by the composer. I love this piece!

[Al Moritz]

Naturally the clarinet is more closely recorded in the recording, but he was as easy to hear in the performance I attended.

Thanks for that info, but wasn't the ensemble relative to the clarinet much louder? That's what I would expect.

An interesting feature of the piece was that he moved around the stage during the performance, each movement positioning himself nearer a different section of the orchestra.

This is partially audible on the stereo recording as well.

[bhodges]

Seeing the Clarinet concerto live at the Barbican in London with Collins on Clarinet and Knussen conducting was one of the best concert experiences of my life, if not the best.

It is great to read a comment like this about a living composer! 

PS, at the performance here Joe mentions, Lumanovski also moved around, weaving through the ensemble, so there must be instructions in the score to do so.  It made it just as interesting to watch, as to hear.
 
--Bruce

[Joe Barron]

so there must be instructions in the score to do so.  It made it just as interesting to watch, as to hear.

Yes, there are, though movment is optional. I second Bruce's comments about the piece being fun to watch. What really grabbed me about Lumanowski's performance was watching his fingers flutter above the holes. he would also bob from the waist in a manner that reminded me of the saxophonist Art Pepper. That's when the jazz feel really came through for me.

Al, I'll have to get back to you on the engineering of Knussen recording. The piece has been recorded three times, and the one I listened to yesterday was one of the others.

[bhodges]

PS, slightly off-topic, but check out this great video of Lumanovski performing at the 2007 Herdeljezi Festival in California.  Quite different music, but he brought similar intensity to the Carter.

--Bruce

[Guido]

Al, I think we're talking about the same recording - the one coupled with the Sinfonia. I was sitting right in the front row (watching the sweat bead off Knussen!), so I could hear the soloist very well all the time, though I didn't make a direct comparison with the recording immediately afterwards. As I said I'm sure that the soloist has been miked forward here (artificially louder), but it doesn't strike me as changing much of the effect of the piece - he was pretty prominent in the textures throughout. As I say though, it might have been different further back in the hall. We'll let the expert answer this one!

[not edward]

I can just say that when I saw Alain Damiens play the concerto with the EIC and David Robertson in Edinburgh in the late '90s he was definitely a little "above" the ensemble for the most part. He also did the walking from position to position, which worked well for me in concert (though I didn't entirely get the hang of the piece on first hearing, and it's never been amongst my real Carter favourites).

It was a pretty memorable night anyway--the second half of the concert was the world premiere of Boulez's sur Incises....

[Joe Barron]

Inspired by Al's comments, I went back tonight and listened to all three of my recordings of the Clairnet Concerto, comparing performances and engineering, which, frankly, I'm not really very good at. Al, I see what you mean about the miking on the Collins-Knussen recording. The effect seems most pronounced at the beginning and tapers away as the piece progresses. Or maybe I just got used to the effect. The clarinet in the Damiens-Boulez recording has the most space and reverb around it and seems the most embedded in the ensemble--- to a fault, perhaps. At times, especially near the beginning, everyone seems far away. The Aldrich-Villaincourt on Atma falls somewhere between the two, and of the three soloists, Simon Aldrich has the mellowest tone. He is not as piercing in the forte sections as the other two. Still, all there are good performances, though I think it's odd that the groups performing some of the best music written by an American in the past ten years are English, French, and Canadian. Ah, well.

In any event, this discussion and Lumanovski's performance in January have given me a greater enthusiasm for the piece. 

[Catison]

Over the past couple days I have the Pacifica Quartet CD in my car.  All I can say is, "wow".  I have never heard so much clarity in the quartets before.  They really emphasize the quartet's American character, bringing out the rhythmic irregularities common to his Copland period.  I feel like I really understand this music now.

[Joe Barron]

It is indeed a fine recording. I'm eager to hear their rendition of the Second on the next disk.

Below is an interview with Ursula Oppens that appears on voiceofsandiego.org. She's one of my heroes, and she takes a swipe at Bernard Holland, which is always gratifying.

'Queen' of Modern Piano Performance
By Cathy Robbins

Friday, April 4, 2008 | "In the eighteenth century the piano sang. In the nineteenth it danced. The twentieth century liked to use the piano as an assault weapon." Critic Bernard Holland wasn't thinking about Jerry Lee Lewis when he wrote this in a review of new piano music in The New York Times a couple of weeks ago.

Ursula Oppens' answer to Holland was uncompromising. "That's such a silly generalization," she said in a phone interview from her home in New York.

Oppens has been called the "queen" of modern piano performance, relentlessly integrating new music into concert programming. She can play a mean Beethoven concerto and commission dozens of works from living composers.

On Sunday evening, Oppens perform contemporary music for the closing concert of the Athenaeum's chamber music series. Most of the pieces were written for her, and one of them will have its West Coast premiere here.

Although the works on the program are as diverse as the century we live in, the composers share some commonalities. "All of them are primarily pianists. One thread in the program is that they are all are interested in piano virtuosity," Oppens said.

The pieces on the program use the instrument in a conventional way. None of the works require modern techniques like plucking the strings or hitting the keyboard with a fist or a forearm (the piano as assault weapon?).

All the composers are living Americans; four of the five are exactly 70, while Elliott Carter will turn 100 later this year. Oppens said she designed the program in part because so many of America's important composers were born in the same year, 1938.

Oppens ventured one theory for this coincidence. The composers came of age at a time when so many revolutionary artists like Stravinsky and Hindemith arrived from Europe, and the Americans grew up in an environment of exciting musical possibilities.

Carter, for instance, counted Charles Ives as a mentor and was listening to or hanging out with composers such as Igor Stravinsky, Francois Poulenc, Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, Duke Ellington, Aaron Copland, and Samuel Barber.

As Alex Ross points out in his new book on twentieth century music, "The Rest is Noise," this was also a time when pop and art music were closer than ever before, closer than they have been since.

Churning musical styles and attitudes help explain the broad range of modern compositions. Charles Wuorinen is known for his highly complex, structured and dense works. "Blue Bamboula," which Oppens will play, is all play, however.

When Oppens commissioned "Blue Bamboula" from Wuorinen she asked him to sustain the spirit of his other two "Bamboula" works -- "Bamboula Squared," for computer-generated tape and orchestra; and "Bamboula Beach," with Cuban themes.

"Blue Bamboula," has a jaunty rhythm and energy that reflects its lineage, namely the Afro-Caribbean dance and the drum of that name. Louis Moreau Gottschalk, one of America's earliest composers, also wrote a piece titled "Bamboula." A Creole living before the Civil War, Gottschalk was inspired by slave dances he watched on the streets of New Orleans.

The two pieces by Joan Tower, each about five minutes long, are based on poems by John Ashberry. They are deceptively light-hearted. With "Holding A Daisy," it's easy to imagine a game of "He love me, he loves me not" as the petals drift away. The music intensifies as emotional uncertainty increases and then dissipates as the lover is left with a question. "Or Like a ... an Engine" races with hard-driving energy through scales to a Chopin etude.

William Bolcom is a prolific writer of everything from pop and cabaret songs to opera. The 2004 recording of his "Songs of Innocence and Experience," in which Bolcom set William Blake's 46 poems to music, picked up four Grammys.

For Oppens, he has written "Ballad," the premiere for the concert. Dark and somewhat atonal, it is atypical of Bolcom's lighter short works. When Oppens asked Bolcom about its mood, the composer answered that the war in Iraq had been affecting him.

In "Night Fantasies," Elliott Carter takes the listener into that slippery place between wakefulness and sleep, when you are just drifting away or tossing and turning. The 24-minute piece starts quietly, goes through a period of turbulence, then ends quietly.

Oppens said that Robert Schumann's Romantic writing influenced the piece's shifting moods. "It's the most complicated piano work, most difficult work. It's a great piece. It goes through many worlds,"she said.

The program ends with a work that will touch working parents. Oppens said that "Mayn Yingele" ("My Little Boy") was a present for her from Frederic Rzewski who took inspiration for it from a nineteenth-century poem.

In the poem, an immigrant comes home from the sweatshop where he works to find his son asleep. Standing over the boy, the father grieves because his long hours keep him from his son. The father kisses the boy who wakes up just long enough to see him then fall asleep again. "Depressed and embittered, I think to myself:/One day, when you awake, my child, you will not find me/Anymore."

In just 13 minutes, Rzewski takes the listener through the poem's collected feelings: love, tenderness, sadness, loneliness, exhaustion, and finally, anger. In its theme and its music, this is the most audience-friendly piece on the program, Oppens said.

Although UCSD is internationally recognized for its avant garde music, San Diego's music patrons have been tepid in their response. Oppens, however, has chosen this program carefully to offer a rich plate of modern goodies.

Rzewski made room in "Mayn Yingele" for an extended improvisational cadenza. We won't know what that sound like until we set foot in the Athenaeum on Sunday.

But then, that's what Oppens said we should expect in any concert of contemporary music. "There's not a single style of new music. If you go to a concert, you have no idea of what it's going to sound like, and that's very exciting."

[Al Moritz]

Thanks, Joe and Guido, for your comments on the recordings of the Clarinet Concerto.

[Catison]

Perhaps this has been posted before, but this podcast contains an awesome interview with Carter in which he describes his development as a composer and an explanation about the quartets.  It also previews the latest Naxos release.

[mp3=200,20,0,center]http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/NaxosClassicalMusicSpotlight/~5/225004776/carter_interview.mp3[/mp3]

[greg]

Perhaps this has been posted before, but this podcast contains an awesome interview with Carter in which he describes his development as a composer and an explanation about the quartets.  It also previews the latest Naxos release.

[mp3=200,20,0,center]http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/NaxosClassicalMusicSpotlight/~5/225004776/carter_interview.mp3[/mp3]

Nice....... how'd you find it?

[Catison]

Nice....... how'd you find it?

It is part of a series of Naxos podcasts they put out each week that features a new recording.

[(poco) Sforzando]

It has yet to be mentioned here that Levine and the Met orchestra are doing the Variations again at Carnegie, on Thursday, May 22 at 8pm.

[Joe Barron]

COOL! I didn't know about it, and I'd love to hear the variations live again.

[greg]

It is part of a series of Naxos podcasts they put out each week that features a new recording.

Wow, what a find! Lots of good stuff here, just turned on the podcast for the Wooden Prince and the opening itself makes me wanna listen......
also, some odd stuff like Gloria Coate's 15th symphony, Georgian music... lol looks interesting though

[Joe Barron]

Click here to watch and listen to a performance of Mr. Carter's Shard played on electric guitar.

It is also the second time I can recall seeing a short work of Mr. Carter's perfromed from memory.