Elliott Carter: Symphony No. 1; Piano Concerto (2004)

An Introduction To Elliott Carter

This CD, part of the Naxos "American Classics" series will serve as a good introduction to the music of Elliott Carter (1908 -- 2012) one of the most prominent and difficult of modern American composers.

As an adolescent, Carter met the great American composer Charles Ives who encouraged the fledgling composer. But Carter evolved as a composer very slowly and did not develop his own unique voice until the early 1950s. He has continued to compose and to develop well into his 90s.

This budget-priced CD with the late Kenneth Schermerhorn (d. April 18,2005) conducting the Nashville Symphony Orchestra allows a rare opportunity for the listener to explore Carter's development by presenting two early works together with Carter's difficult piano concerto, composed in 1964-1965.

The two early works are the short Holiday Overture (1944, revised in 1961) and the Symphony No. 1 (1942, revised 1954). These works are tonal and accessible -- perhaps excessively conservative even for their time. They show the influence of Aaron Copland and of an early Charles Ives without the fireworks.

The Holiday Overture was composed in 1944. It is a fanfare celebrating the liberation of France in WW II. It is uptempo, brassy, and uplifting with strong rhythm and a sense of optimism. Aaron Copland, who greatly admired Carter's later, difficult scores, remarked tongue-in-cheek late in his life that the Holiday Overture was "another difficult piece by Carter."

The Symphony No. 1 is a quiet, pastoral piece somewhat in the manner of Ives's second symphony. It is in three movements and features nicely balanced writing between the strings and the winds and shifting rhythms that became a later characteristic of Carter's music.

I found the Holiday Overture and the Symphony pleasant if somewhat bland. But in the hearing them, I understood that Carter had not yet found his musical voice which he developed only in 1951 with his first string quartet. The piano concerto, dedicated to Igor Stravinsky, is a difficult bristling modern composition, atonal and dissonant in style with shifting complex rhythms and the many musical voices frequently working at cross-purposes with each other. Yet, with all its difficulty, this is the type of music that made, and justly so, Carter's reputation. The two early pieces heard on this CD have value primarily as a foil to this later work. With the development of his modernist style, Carter played to his strengths and wrote music that was uniquely his own.

The piano concerto is in two movements of approximately equal length. The piano part is juxtaposed not only against the orchestra, as in a traditional concerto, but in a small concertante ensemble consisting, according to the informative liner notes, of flute, English horn, bass clarinet, violin, viola, cello, and double bass. Each of these instruments has short solo or ensemble passages in which it plays with the orchestra. The first movement opens with a piano solo followed by various combinations of the piano and the concertante group with the orchestra in the background. In the second movement, I think, the procedure is reversed with the orchestra playing a dominant role early in the movement and developing it as the movement progresses until the concertante group and the piano take over at the quiet close of the piece. The lines in the piece are generally short with the various instruments playing against each other. The most sustained passages are in the loud orchestral outbursts in the second movement. Rhythmic shifts are frequent and the music is atonal. This is a difficult, challenging piece, but I found it rewarding. Mark Wait, Dean and Professor of Music at Vanderbilt University, Tennessee, plays admirably this extraordinarily difficult piano music.

This concerto is tough, uncompromising and bristling modern music but it is full of emotional power. At a time when he had already reached mid-life, Carter saw the need to channel his talents in a new direction and to leave the rather conventional paths his music had followed in his early years. His path was full of risk and uncertainty. But he has produced music that is modern, unique, and his own.

This CD -- in the contrast between the two early works and the later piano concerto -- reminded me of the difference between following convention and striking out for oneself. Carter certainly made the right choice when he pursued the latter course.

Robin Friedman