Masters of disorientation

One of the joys of unemployment is all the extra reading time. Recently, I’ve gone through studies of two of my favorite postwar American artists – Hiding Man, Tracy Daugherty's biography of his friend and mentor Donald Barthelme, and David Schiff’s latest assessment of his friend and mentor Elliott Carter.

Writer and composer have now become linked in my mind, and not just because I’ve read books about them in quick succession. For decades, they lived literally around the corner from one another in Lower Manhattan -- Barthelme at 113 West 11th Street, Carter at 31 West 12^th – although there is no record  that they ever met. We also don’t know if Carter knew Barthelme’s work, even though Barthelme was a regular contributor to the New Yorker, and Carter a regular reader. (He was not familiar with Woody Allen’s writings for the magazine, Schiff says.) On the other hand, Daugherty informs us, in September 1962, Barthelme, then working as director of the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, arranged a performance of Carter’s music. (I would really like to know what the piece was.)

Barthelme, born in 1931 and raised in Texas, was a full generation younger than Carter, a native New Yorker born in 1908.  In terms of their intellectual pursuits and their efforts to expand the language of modernism in their respective fields, however, the two appear to have much in common. I got the feeling of covering much the same philosophical ground in each book. Names of influential figures -- Beckett, Joyce, Pound, Eliot, Ashbery, Philip Johnson – recur, and Schiff and Daugherty reach similar conclusions in trying to pin down the meaning of “modernism” and “post-modernism.”

Here’s Schiff:  “The overused term Modernism makes the most sense when it denotes an evolving, many-sided disputation about the relation of art to the rapidly changing conditions of modern life, rather than a coherent movement or body of ideas.”

And here’s Daugherty: “’Post-modernism’ does not – cannot -- denote a single ethos. Nor is it solely the province of artists, writers and academics; if by ‘post-modern’ we mean style over substance, a blurring of values, and vague historical awareness, then the conditions for it are set by  lawyers, real estate developers, money speculators, televangelists, and the nation’s professional political class, along with its symbiotic companion, the professional media.

“Remember Don’s remark: ‘The disorientation in my stories is not mine. It is what is to be perceived around us.’”

Even the word “flaneur” shows up in both texts. I had never in my life encountered the word “flaneur.”

Despite the difference in their ages, Carter and Barthelme produced some of their most  characteristic, innovative work in the 1960s, a time of political and cultural turmoil – and of violence -- in the United States and abroad. Barthelme addressed the Vietnam War and the Parisian Days of Rage explicitly. Carter disavowed any political programs in his music, although the turmoil is certainly there to be heard. (Phil Lesh, bass player for the Grateful Dead and a big Carter fan, once told me that as far as he is concerned, the Concerto for Orchestra is 1968.)

In the end, too, both men saw their moments pass, their stars partially eclipsed by a more self-consciously populist aesthetic. I found it poignant that the phenomenon known as “minimalism” dogged each of them. In literature, the minimalist par excellence was Raymond Carver. In music, of course, it is Philip Glass.

Of the two, Schiff’s book is harder to categorize. It’s not quite a critical biography (which Schiff says has yet to be written), not quite a memoir of a friendship, not quite a reception history, not quite an analysis of the music -- although it contains elements of all of these. If backed into a corner, I’d call it a start in the process of historical evaluation.

Carter’s death, in 2012, seems to have freed Schiff to say publically things he must have kept private while the composer was alive. He is more critical of some of the music than he’s been in the past, offers interpretations and terminology at odds with Carter’s own, and even makes a few good jokes. It’s clear he doesn’t care for Carter’s only opera, “What Next?”, though his dislike seems to have more to do with Paul Griffith’s libretto than with Carter’s music.

(As an aside, I’d submit that Barthelme would have made an ideal librettist for Carter. He had just the knack for surreal comedy Carter was looking for, and some of his all-dialogue stories have been successfully staged. Unfortunately, he died – of throat cancer, at age 58, in 1989 – years before Carter ever considered writing an opera. Life is full of tantalizing what-ifs.)

As with everything Schiff writes, there are quotable insights on almost every page of Carter, but I must say I didn’t find his comments on A Symphony of Three Orchestras as enlightening as they might have been. The decay of New York in the ’70s (another occasional theme in Barthelme’s work) might provide a plausible context for the descent from the soaring trumpet solo of the opening to the “bludgeoning, mechanical ostinato of the coda,” but to my ear, it doesn’t account for all that sumptuous stuff in the middle.

The notion that Carter’s musical personality may be divided into “Carter Light” and “Carter Dark” isn’t quite fully developed, either, and, forgive me, it makes him sound like a brand of beer. (Other product lines would include Carter Pale Ale and Carter Winter Lager.)

Hiding Man and Carter also suggest these New York neighbors currently occupy the kind of critical limbo that often follows an artist’s death. Barthelme and Carter await rediscovery and a cultural positioning that may be possible, if ever, only when our current, partisan squabbles about modernism are over. 

In the meantime, I read, I listen.

Andrew Porter, 1928-2015

I want to take a few moments  to note the passing of Andrew Porter, the music critic for The New Yorker magazine from 1972 to 1992. The dates are important for me, since Porter began writing for American readers at the same time that I, as a teenager, was discovering serious music. I grew up on him. His lucid, poetic explanations of how compositions worked, as well as his vast erudition – noted in all the appreciations published this week – helped me to understand and verbalize what it was I found so exciting in those years.

Consider, for example, his extended description of the opening of Elliott Carter’s Symphony of Three Orchestras:

High on the violins, as one thin, shining, open-textured chord is laid upon another, in sifting aeolian strains, it seems as if the cradle of wires overhead may be sounding: “Sibylline voices flicker, wavering stream, As though a god were issue of the strings.” [The quotation is from The Bridge, by Hart Crane.] The violins span the stage from side to side. Between them,  three piccolos then break in with keen, bright bird cries, given added sharpness by high, sharp hammer beats from piano and xylophone;  clarinets and oboes swell the shrill chorus to a brief tumult … And then a single trumpet wings out in a long solo flight. Wheeling through the faint, ethereal  violin chords, it mounts, hovers, circles down, soars again, swiftly plummets, stays for a moment poised low, traces a final, sudden ascent and fall before coming to rest … A series of emphatic descending figures from the orchestra in turn ends the introduction …, and the symphonic argument begins in earnest with a huge span of sixths softly sustained by the strings of one orchestra and giocoso chattering of two bassoons from another.

That is as evocative and accurate a description of that music – or any music – as you will ever encounter. Reading it, only a few weeks after I attended the premiere of the symphony in New York, was like hearing the piece again, and for the three years before the recording was finally released, it was as close as I could get to a second hearing. 

For his entire tenure at the New Yorker, Porter was the only friend Carter had in the New York press (the Times critics famously hated him), and when he finally left the magazine,  he wrote that he did so with a sense of optimism, since the Times had finally hired a critic – Edward Rothstein – who kept an open mind. Rothstein, unfortunately, didn't stay long at the music desk, and Porter’s ultimate successor at The New Yorker carried on the Times’ lamentable tradition. The more the years went by, the more I missed him, and not just for his championship of modernism.

(He wasn't a blind enthusiast, either. He could be scathing about Charles Wuorinen, and Charles Ives remained a blind spot. His essay on Ives, written for the composer’s centenary in 1974, was lukewarm and relied rather too heavily on Frank Rossiter’s critical biography. It’s odd: despite the biographical and philosophical connection between the two composers, few critics seem to like them both.)  

I was lucky enough to meet Porter a couple brief times. The first was in 1988 in College Park, where he moderated a panel at the University of Maryland’s Handel Festival. (At that time, I was living just down the road in Hyattsville.)  He signed my copy of Music of Three Seasons, the source of excerpt above. My wife at the time, who had studied Russian, complimented him on his opera translations, and I thanked him for his writings about Carter. When I said I was one of the few musical laymen who admired Carter’s music, he replied, “I am very glad to hear it.”

To quote Auden on Yeats: 

O, all the instruments agree

The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Doesn't matter what the temperature in London was, or whether the sun was shining. 

      

All Carter, all the time

Yesterday I took the Jersey Transit to New York for the 2 p.m. all-Elliott Carter program at Carnegie Hall. Leon Botstein conducted the American Symphony Orchestra with guest artists Anthony McGill, clarinet; Mary MacKenzie, soprano; and Teresa Buchholz, mezzo. The hall was less than half full. Up in the dress circle, where I was sitting, everyone would have fit into one of the five seating sections. As with all Carter concerts, however, the crowd, such as it was, was knowledgeable and enthusiastic. It was rewarded with a good concert that fell several steps short of great.

The bad news first: The program ended with the extraordinary Concerto for Orchestra from 1969, the piece I was most eager to hear, and the afternoon’s big disappointment. The reading was note perfect, but it lacked definition. The climactic moments didn’t stand out, and individual incidents did not emerge from the surrounding texture so much as they sat on top of it. In short, the music didn’t flow. The pieces were all there, but they did not come together. I missed the energy, the grandeur and the spaciousness I find in my several recordings of the work. A friend said afterwards that if he were feeling generous, he would describe the performance as subdued and lyrical. I’ll forego generosity and call it weak. The musicians found it rough going, I suspect, but the failure was ultimately Botstein’s. Back in 2008, Oliver Knussen proved just how exciting the piece can be when he led a pickup orchestra of young musicians in a well-shaped, thrilling performance at the Tanglewood Music Festival. (Anyone curious about why I love this music should watch the performance video on YouTube.)

On the plus side (and it was a big plus), Anthony McGill was dazzling in the 1996 Clarinet Concerto, and Botstein was wise enough not to stand in his way. His tempos were brisk, and if he wasn’t especially nuanced, he was exciting. From the very opening riffs, he swung. It was the most memorable performance of the day.

The concert opened with a solid reading of Pocahontas, Carter's attractive and underplayed ballet from the late 1930s (though the Suite was composed 1960). This is early Carter, written in the rangy, relatively populist style he was devoted to at the time, and while it has been described as derivative of several other composers, it has a feeling of its own, marked by the composer’s way with counterpoint and a love of percussion that became increasingly important in his later work. It was a pleasure to hear.

In the second half, just before the Concerto for Orchestra, MacKenzie and Buchholz joined Botstein and the crew for two early songs. MacKenzie was touching in “A Warble for Lilac Time,” though from where I was sitting, it was hard to judge Buchholz’s handling of “Voyage,” since she was swamped several times by the orchestra.

The program also included an oddly energetic performance of the supposedly contemplative “Sound Fields” for strings.

More coments on my Carter talk

These two comments from members of the Philadelphia Friends of Classical Music:

"Wonderful lecture given by Joe Barron, well thought out, and capturing the tenor of Carter's compositional life. I had not realized the extent of his personal relationship with Charles Ives, and I especially enjoyed some of the compare and contrast examples of both of their work."

"I knew nothing of Elliott Carter beyond his name, and Joe's presentation gave me a running start for future listening. He gave a solid overview of Carter & his music's development along with musical examples, but, as usual, there wasn't enough time for enough music! And as a result, I plan on listening to more of this composer's music."

"I suspect that exploring Carter's music on one's own could be much like entering a dark, thorny woods, but the journey was made far easier and more productive with Joe as our expert guide."

Seriously, I'm available for your next corporate event.

Speaking of Carter

After decades of listening, study, and concertgoing, I gave my first real lecture on Elliott Carter last night. I spoke to the Philadelphia Fans of Classical Music at a beautiful private apartment (co-op, really) in Melrose Park, about a fifteen-minute drive from where I live. About 18 people showed up, and they all stayed to the end.

It was Carter 101. I covered the basics of his life and goals and played about twenty or so musical examples, which I burned onto a single CD a week ago. I spoke off the cuff, with a few notes, and had to edit myself as I went along. I had only two ours to speak, with a ten-minute snack break. That wasn’t nearly enough time to impart all of the information I could have. (I never mentioned the Congress for Cultural Freedom.) I therefore focused on Carter’s relationship to Charles Ives and his music, and his appreciation for poetry, which helped me organize my thoughts. I felt I stammered, faltered, repeated myself too often, but no one seemed to notice. I was tired and hungry when it was over, as I am after an afternoon of cycling.

Reaction has been uniformly positive. The comments left on the group’s website have been complimentary. One person even said she’d be interested in a second, more detailed presentation focused on a single time period or a few pieces. Another said he was particularly impressed that “18 people came and listened to music by one of the most difficult composers of modern times, stayed through the whole presentation, and came away (in large part) loving it.”

Now that I know I can do this, I’m thinking of hiring myself out for weddings and graduation parties.

EC PC: Lateiner v. Oppens

Over the past week, two of my most knowledgeable correspondents have written stating their preference for the premiere recording of Elliott Carter's Piano Concerto — Jacob Lateiner, soloist, with the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Erich Leinsdorf — over all subsequent versions. They were so articulate, and so sure of themselves, that I began to doubt my own judgment in favor of Ursula Oppens’ recording with Michael Gielen and the Cincinnati Symphony. So this afternoon, while nursing my usual headache after the Saturday end to my work week, I went back and listened to both recordings, back to back.

I can see the attraction for Lateiner. My friends were right about the sensitivity and comparative luxuriance of his playing, as reflected in the longer track times. (The difference in the total timing between the two versions is three and a half minutes.) The approach yields many memorable and beautiful moments.

If forced to choose, however (and let’s be thankful we never are), I still have to go with Oppens/Gielen as my preferred version. Considered as a whole, the performance is stunning. “Gripping” was the word I used in my Amazon review, and I meant that almost literally: It grabs me from the first and doesn’t let go. I can’t sit still while listening to it. Oppens’ headlong rush has great cumulative power, as if she is becoming more desperate to escape the orchestra as the piece evolves. The Cincinnati Symphony, as an ensemble, gives the concerto a greater unity and direction than the BSO does, with a surer grasp of phrasing and dynamics and a great burst of fury at the end. It just sounds, well, better rehearsed.

I knew there was a reason I found the recording so compelling the first time I heard it. Now I remember.

Where my e-pals and I agree is that the concerto is one of the great works of the past century.

There are three other commercial recordings of the work, including a second with Oppens and Gielen, this time with the SWF Symphony. I’ll be getting back to them soon.

Carter News

John G. writes:

I thought you might like to know that the first (LP) recording of the Carter Piano Concerto (Lateiner / Leinsdorf / BSO) was released last May by Sony, as part of a five disk set titled Prophets of the New. The set is already unavailable, but each of the disks can now be had, individually, from ArchivMusic. And the Carter CD is well worth having. It features the Prausnitz recordings (originally Columbia; 1968?) of the Variations for Orchestra and the Double Concerto, together with the inaugural Lateiner performance of the Piano Concerto (originally RCA). All three of these performances are worthwhile, but for my money it is the Piano Concerto that steals the show. As I remembered, this account is slower than all of the recorded competition, and it pays off. The Boston winds and solo strings are stunningly eloquent; the byplay among them and the piano is much more telling here than in any other recording. And Lateiner! He makes every note expressive, and the whole comes vividly, tremblingly to life (for me) as in no other performance to date, including the Rosen one. His account of the "poetic musing" of the opening phrases is just right, and sets the tone for what follows.

Have a listen. I'd be curious to know whether or not you agree with me.

If only some gifted pianist with a sufficiently high profile would champion this score, surely one of the greatest of the last century. Like so many of the Carter's orchestral pieces (even now), it is not performed remotely as often as it should be. Oh well.

I was not aware of this release, but I've had the original LPs for more than 30 years, and I ordered my copy of the CD immediately. I must say I've never shared John's admiration of the Lateiner/Leinsdorf/BSO recording of the Piano Concerto — I never really turned on to the piece until I heard Ursula Oppens' recording with Michael Gielen and the Cincinnati Symphony — but I promise to give it my full attention again once the CD arrives. The Columbia LP of the Variations and Double Concerto, with Prausnitz conducting, was the first Carter recording I ever owned, and it is still a favorite. There are no better recordings of either piece (and I love the photo of the composer on the cover). I urge any of you who have not heard them to grab the CD while you can.

In other news, I have just learned that Leon Botstein will conduct the American Symphony Orchestra in an all-Carter program at Carnegie Hall on Sunday, November 17. I am already counting the days. The program will include the early Pocahontas and the great Concerto for Orchestra. There is some question out here in blogsville over whether Botstein is up to the task. He's an ambitious, knowledgeable follow, but not an especially inspired interpreter. Still, it's the Concerto for Orchestra, for heaven's sake. John G. writes that he heard Botstein conduct the piece about ten years ago, and, in his words, it wasn't half bad.

That's recommendation enough.

Found the Quote

In taking the hacksaw to Elliott Carter, Daniel Asia says of the rehearsals for the Concerto for Orchestra, under Leonard Bernstein:

It should be noted that Bernstein wasn't impressed by the fact that Carter wasn't aware that the clarinetist was playing in the wrong transposition for much of the piece ... why, when certain pitch relations were important to Carter, and he apparently couldn't detect errant pitches, shouldn't this suggest serious reservations about the composer and his music?

As I noted earlier, one of my correspondents wondered where Asia got this story, since he did not attend the rehearsals, and another suggested it was an urban legend, since he had heard the same thing about Schoenberg. I, too, thought I recalled something of the sort, and, rereading Charles Rosen's indispensable monograph Arnold Schoenberg (1975), I found this (pp. 49-50):

From time to time there appear malicious stories of eminent conductors who have not realized that, in a piece of Webern or Schoenberg, the clarinetist, for example, picked up an A instead of a B-flat clarinet and played his part a semitone off. These recurrent tales, often true, do not have the significance given them by the critics who believe that music should have stopped at Debussy, as each individual line in Schoenberg's music and even in Webern's later pointillist style defines a harmonic sense that, even when transposed, can fit into the general harmony of the work as a whole. (Here we must remember that harmony is conveyed as powerfully along a musical line as it is by a simultaneous chord.) The attenuation of the traditional concept of dissonance gives a considerable freedom to the movement of the individual instrumental voices, and for this to take place the central position in the hierarchy of musical elements can no longer be given to pitch. What is clear, indeed, is that the simple linear hierarchy must give way to a new and more complex set of relationships in which pitch is only one element among others, and not by any means always the most important.

So there you are -- Mr. Asia’s little gotcha moment has been addressed, and 35 years in advance.

And how stupid are clarinetists anyway?

Mr. Carter once said that while he could not, like Boulez, pick apart every detail of a performance, his music, when played correctly, sounded just as he imagined it. I will add only that for me, the reason Asia's story, true or not, doesn't suggest "serious reservations" about Mr. Carter's music is that the Concerto for Orchestra kicks neoromantic ass.

My review of the latest Carter release

Herewith the review I just posted at Amazon (I just love saying "herewith"):

Bridge Records continues its extraordinary survey of the music of Elliott Carter with a selection that covers entire career, from 1938 (when he was just turning 30) to his 101^st birthday. The centerpiece of the program is the Piano Concerto of 1964-65, a complex masterpiece from Carter’s heroic period.  The concerto has been recorded four times previously, and one might be tempted to react to yet another one with a shrug. But one would be wrong. Soloist Charles Rosen and former Juilliard Quartet violinist Joel Smirnoff, here conducting the Basel Sinfonietta, deliver a surprisingly intimate, even romantic account that reveals another side to a piece that David Schiff  described as an exploration of “the tragic possibilities of alienation on a visionary scale.” Bridge producer David Starobin said to me not long ago, “This is not a modern music performance,” which I think sums it up. It’s exquisite.

For the rest, Steve Beck completes the recorded catalog of Carter’s piano music with five of the composer’s late miniatures. (I especially liked his account of the rapid-fire Catenaires, which strikes me as fleeter and less punchy than Ursula Oppens’.) Tony Arnold sings two early songs in Carter’s own masterful orchestrations from 1979, and, in a rare treat, Rosalind Rees, soprano, and David Starobin, guitar, start off the proceedings with “Tell Me Where is Fancy Bred,” a faux-Elizabethan setting of Shakespeare that Carter wrote in 1938 for Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre of the Air.

The final track is the premiere recording of Nine by Five, subtitled Wind Quintet No. 2, written in 2009. It takes its title from the fact that four of the five players (the horn is the exception), double on higher and lower instruments at various points in the work. Despite its late vintage, it feels like a return to the Carter of the 1970s, with its extremes of range and dynamics, and it is one of the most attractive, colorful scores from the composer’s final years. The reading by the Slovenian group Slowind might not be as exciting or extroverted as the premiere performance I heard in New York in 2010 (or maybe I was just keyed up that night), but it’s well-balanced and taut, and it will do nicely. The piece is an instant favorite.    

 

P.S. The reaction to the announcement of this release was lukewarm over at Good Musicc Guide, given that most of the pieces may be thought of as minor, and there's a lot more of Carter's late work that still needs to be recorded, but I have to say this is a fine recording in terms of the performances and the sound quality. The early songs may not be up to Carter's later standards, though Schiff says "Voyage" is Carter's first real masterpiece, and I would rather have them than not, if only for the sake of completeness. And two of the piano Tributes are first recodings, though you'd never know it from the liner notes. 

What is a premiere?

Something called the Amphion Foundation has set up a website devoted to Elliott Carter.  It's standard stuff, though easily navigated, with a canned biography, a list of works and tributes from friends (many of which were printed in the attractively produced booklet handed out at Wednesday's memorial concert with the even more attractively produced program). Most helpful is the schedule of upcoming performances. It's encouraging to see that Mr. Carter's music is surviving him.

I am confused, however, by the notices for Epigrams. The June 22 performance in the UK is labeled the "world premiere," and the August 9 performance at Tanglewood is given as the "US premiere." I could have sworn I heard the piece two nights ago in New York City, which, as I recall, is in both the US and the world. That performance doesn't seem to have counted (and it is not listed as the premiere in the attractively produced program). I'm not up on modern music etiquette, and the only reason I can think of is that attendance at Wednesday's concert was, officially, by invitation only, and the performance was therefore a private occasion. Nevertheless, the public was admitted on a standby basis, and everyone who wanted a seat got one.  I count myself in that category. I was there as the guest of someone whose name appeared on the in-crowd list (thanks, BH), but if I hadn't been, I would have waited outside in the heat and humidity with the rest of the nonentities.

So when is a premiere not a premiere?

Carter Memorial

I attended my first all−Elliott Carter program in April 1976, when Speculum Musicae performed at the YMHA on South Broad Street in Philadelphia. I was 18 years old. Fred Sherry played the Cello Sonata. Rolf Schulte played the Duo. Both were accompanied by Ursula Oppens on piano.

Last night, I watched Schulte, Sherry, and Oppens present the world premiere of Epigrams, the last piece Elliott Carter wrote. Little has changed in 37 years (and Rolf’s hair hasn’t changed at all). The biggest difference between last night and 1976 is that last night, Mr. Carter was not present.

The premiere was the centerpiece of a memorial concert at the Peter Jay Sharp Theatre in Manhattan. Just about everyone who matters in Carter’s world was there. Friends greeted one another with kisses. The men wore ties. Carter’s son, David, delivered a brief speech from his wheelchair. Several of Carter’s musical friends and associates also spoke. I felt as though I had walked into the kind of wake I used to attend as a Catholic schoolboy. The only things missing were the smell of eucalyptus and the open casket.

My sense sense loss was strongest, however, during a brief film that included old interviews with the composer. It pained me to watch him speak from the grave. I was also reminded of how much I miss Charles Rosen, who appeared in several clips.

(Rosen spoke of the way in which Carter synthesized the legacies of Stravinsky and Schoenberg. The legacy of Ives went unacknowledged.)

Besides Epigrams, the program included Mad Regales, for six voices a cappella, and What Are Years? — the song cycle on poems of Marianne More. Lucy Shelton was the vocalist. David Fulmer conducted. The performances were all excellent, if brief. (In a program lasting close to two hours, there was perhaps 40 minutes worth of music.) Mad Regales was especially memorable, thanks largely to the presence of the bass baritone Evan Hughes. Oppens introduced Epigrams as  “twelve examples of how not to write a trio” and said Carter had fun writing it.

From my perspective, it’s a small-scale tour de force, an exploration of the sonorities possible in the unwieldy combination of violin, cello, and piano. Carter enjoyed a challenge, and the challenge in this case was balance. Despite the brevity of the movements, it’s a substantial piece, and it seemed fitting that the last note of the last composition Carter would ever write was a single violin pizzicato preceded by several seconds of silence. Under the circumstances, it felt like a gesture of farewell.

An urban legend is born

In his hatchet job at the Huffington Post, Daniel Asia says that, during rehearsals for the first performance of the Concerto for Orchestra, Elliott Carter did not notice that a clarinetist played the wrong transposition for much of the piece, and that Bernstein, the conductor, was unimpressed with him (Carter). Asia thinks it’s a big deal, because Carter, as we know, was all about intervals. One of my correspondents, something of a Carter expert, emailed me yesterday, in part:

I wonder where he heard the Bernstein story from since he (Asia) would not have been at the rehearsal.

He cc'd another of my correspondents (also a Carter aficion), who replied thus:

I wondered about that too. I'm beginning to think that “can't hear the wrong clarinet transposition” story is an urban legend. I heard Richard Wilson tell it about Schoenberg yesterday on a panel. (Another good one is the "learn the piece on the train and play it for the first time at the concert" story, which I've now heard about three different pianists.)

In my initial post, I had planned to say that I saw no gross misrepresentations in Asia's essay, but I am revising that estimate.

Carter Lives

Daniel Asia spits on Elliott Carter's grave this week over at the Huffington Post. In a piece titled "Carter is Dead" (evoking Boulez' famous pronouncement on the music of Schoenberg), he says, essentially, that the late Mr. Carter had no real talent and never did anything right in his whole life.

The essay is not interesting, but its timing is. Not only did Asia wait until Carter was safely out of the way. He waited until Charles Rosen was, too. At that point, he must have known the coast was clear, and he could safely to poke his nose out of his burrow. His little presumptions are exactly the sort of thing that Rosen, the Huxley to Carter’s Darwin, was so adept at skewering. He would have chewed it up before breakfast, then tossed off three thousand words on Mozart’s use of tonality.

I suspect that Mr. Asia produced his essay in a spirit of malicious glee, fully expecting a firestorm of protest and ready to declare that the anger and defensiveness of Carter’s admirers is proof that he had somehow touched a nerve. But there really isn’t much here to get upset about, and even less to argue with. The criticisms, such as they are, consist of simple assertions. One either agrees with them or one does not. I do not. Here are some counter-assertions, for the record: Carter’s piano music does not “pale” beside Copland’s; the Eight Etudes for wind quartet hold up quite nicely, thank you; and the finale of the Cello Sonata is hardly “cute.”

I have never changed anyone's mind about music through argument, and no one has ever changed mine. Sometimes, through repeated listening, I have learned to like something I initially found daunting or dull, but I've never stopped liking a piece of music simply because somebody told me to. Everyone is entitled to an opinion, of course, even Mr. Asia, but my listening habits remain unchanged. It's not a matter of "I'm right and he's wrong." It's more a matter of "I'm cool, and he's a doofus."

What I find heartening in Asia's piece, however, is that he really isn’t saying anything Donal Henahan and Harold C. Schoenberg weren’t saying forty years ago. To a man, the sages from our paper of record didn’t think Carter’s music had a future, either, and yet, here we are, forty years later, having the same discussion. If the future is anything like the past, the controversy will continue, and so will the music.

Now, to clear the air, I offer the Adagio of the 1948 Cello Sonata, one of my favorite movements in all of music:

Elliott Carter tribute

Just received from the indispensable John Link:

 

Who else is going?

Carter Volume 9 - not an April Fools' joke

Was poking around Amazon a moment ago and came across the announcement that Vol. 9 of Bridge Records' Elliott Carter Edition will be issued May 1. I have pre-ordered my copy. Here is the description from the Amazon website:

This retrospective disc presents music composed by the late Elliott Carter over a period of more than 70 years. Unquestionably, the major work presented here is the late Charles Rosen's performance of Carter's Piano Concerto. Rosen, a great advocate of Carter's music, had recorded most of Carter's solo piano music over the course of his long career, though he never made a studio recording of Carter's brilliant concerto. The release of this radio recording, featuring the superb Basel Sinfonietta, conducted by Joel Smirnoff, was one of Rosen's last wishes. Volume 9 of Bridge's ongoing Carter series opens with vocal works of Carter's from the 30s and 40s, and proceeds to Steven Beck's electrifying accounts of late solo piano music, and the Slowind Quintet's performance of Carter's quintet, Nine by Five, completed during the composer's 101st year.

For me, the real excitement her involvesthe Piano Concerto (this will be the fifth commercial recording of the piece, but you can never have too many) and the first recording of Nine by Five. I attended the premiere of the piece in February 2010. and I remember it as a refreshing return to the kick-butt Carter of the 1970s.

Here is the complete playlist from Bridge:

Tell Me Where is Fancy Bred (1938) Rosalind Rees, soprano; David Starobin, guitar
Voyage (1943, orch. 1979) & Warble for Lilac Time (1943, orch. 1979) Tony Arnold, soprano; Colorado College Festival Orchestra, Scott Yoo, conductor
Piano Concerto (1964-65), Charles Rosen, piano; Basel Sinfonietta Joel Smirnoff, conductor
Two Thoughts about the Piano (2007) & Tri-Tribute (2007-8), Steven Beck, piano
Nine by Five (2009), Slowind Wind Quintet I can't wait. Thanks to David and Becky Starobin, as always, for their tireless efforts. This will be every bit as much fun as a concert by the Phillyorch would have been.

Philadelphia Orchestra announces an all-Carter program

The Philadelphia Orchestra announced today it has scheduled a special, non-subscription concert devoted entirely to the music of Elliott Carter. The concert will take place Tuesday afternoon, Nov. 5, the first anniversary of Mr. Carter's death. The program is not final, but advance word is that it will include A Symphony of Three Orchestras, which the orchestra last performed in 1984, and the Flute Concerto, with principal flutist Jeffrey Khaner as soloist.

"We are very excited the board has approved this project," Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the orchestra's music director, said in a press release. "This will be a unique tribute to one of America's great creative minds. Philadelphia has been a mecca for new music since the days of Maestro Stokowski, and it has always taken Mr. Carter to its heart.

"We are expecting a sell-out crowd, and we are confident at least half a dozen people will stay for the whole thing."

More from the Carter symposium

When Elliott Carter died in November, his obituaries mentioned that he finished his last work, Epigrams for string trio, the previous August. At the symposium I attended in New York February 14, however, John Link told me the work was not quite complete as Carter left it. The notes are all there, and five of the twelve short movements are in final form, but seven of them do not have the dynamics or articulations marked. Allen Edwards is currently editing the piece, preparing it for a premiere over the summer, John said. Edwards is placing his additions in brackets, as suggestions. The final product will be a substanital, twelve- to eighteen-minute piece.

This information makes me wonder about the state of Carter's health during the final two months of his life. If he couldn't be bothered to put the finishing touches the score, he must not have been feeling at all well. I emailed John about it and received this reply:

I saw him last at the French Embassy when he was inducted into the Legion of Honor [Sept. 21 - JB] and he was looking a bit wan. I believe his health deteriorated fairly steadily from there, although I do know he was alert until almost the very end of his life. But I think he realized it was time to go.

Elliott Carter Symposium

A symposium about Elliott Carter was held last Thursday — Valentine's Day — in New York City. I was off that day, and, fearing I'd been spending too much time in my apartment, I drove to Trenton and caught a train to Manhattan. The gathering was held just across Fifth Avenue from the Empire State Building, just two city blocks from Penn Station, in a little space called the Segal Theater. (The building, a former department store, now belongs to the City University of New York.) About twenty Carter fans listened to a panel of experts swap anecdotes and discuss Carterian performance practice. I might have been the only person there who was not a musician, but I must say I felt at home. It's heartening to hang out, if only for a little while, with folks who share one of your greatest enthusiasms.

The panel was moderated by John Link and consisted of the pianists Ursula Oppens and Steve Beck, violinist Rolf Schulte, soprano Lucy Shelton, cellist Carrie Bean, and composer Jason Eckart. Not surprisingly, the oldest members — Oppens, Shelton and especially Schulte — has the most to say, since they had worked with Carter for many years. (I first heard Schulte and Oppens play Carter's Duo in 1976.)

It was all interesting, of course, although, witnessing the affection the performers obviously felt for the composer, my principal impression was of a gentlemanly soul with very strong opinions. Schulte summed up Carter's personality in three points: (1) He was respectful and never “stepped on your toes." (2) He had very clear idea of how he wanted his music to sound, but (3) once he gave you his advice, he backed off and let you go your own way. Schulte contrasted Carter's manner with the week he spent in Budapest playing for Kurtag, which, he said, was the worst week of his life.

There have been many different interpreters and many different interpretations of Carter's music, and the composer was happy with them all, Oppens said, and that knowledge has informed her approach to older music: it’s freed her from the tyranny of her teachers.

I could go on, but I've already passed five hundred words, and I’ll add only a few more observations.

I was tickled that Oppens remembered me by my email address. When John introduced us, the penny suddenly dropped and she explained, "You're Triple Duo!" It is apparently an easy address to remember.

John began the discussion by reading a quotation from the flutist Robert Aitken, who said that for all the attention given to Carter's technique of metrical metrical modulation, the subject never took up a moment of rehersal time. Carter was always more concerned with the expressiveness and the character of his music than with its mechanics.

Schulte told me afterward that Joan Peyser, author of tell-all books on Bernstein and Boulez, once asked him for the dirt on Elliott Carter. He defiantly — and truthfully — told her there wasn't any.

I finally, finally managed to clear up the misconception that the 15-year-old Carter attended the American premiere of the Rite of Spring in 1924. He did not. He attended the New York premiere. When the subject came up, I raised my hand and pointed out the American premiere took place in 1922, under Stokowski, in Philadelphia. One has to stand up for one’s home town.

David Schiff on Elliott Carter

David Schiff's personal reminiscence of the early years of his relationship with Elliott Carter has just been printed online at The Nation, and can be read here. The piece focuses on the Cleveland Orchestra's performance, under Boulez, of Carter's Concerto for Orchestra. Schiff attended the rehearsals. I was particularly impressed by his description of Carter's calm demeanor in the face of the musicians' hostility.

At one point, Schiff says that 40 years after premiering the work, he NY Philharmonic has yet to revive it. I don't think that's quite true. The NYPO did play it again, under Boulez, in the mid-70s, and a fine — one might even say legendary — recording exists. It's available from the orchestra in a six-CD box set of American music. Perhaps Schiff means the orchestra has not revived the work since the seventies.

In any event, I envy Schiff his life and his talent, but then I envy everyone's life and talent.

I am very sorry I missed this

A concert in memory of Elliott Carter was presented in Greenwich Village Sunday. Unfortunately, I had to work. I would have especially enjoyed hearing the Quintet for Piano and String Quartet and seeing the many Carter hands I have met and befriended over the years. It might be the last time for many years they are all gathered in the same place.

Phooey.