Customer Reviews

Elliot Carter: What Next?

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Happy Birthday Elliot Carter! This ECM disc was released to coincide with Carter's recent 95th birthday. The opera, "What Next?", was composed in 1997, commissioned by Daniel Barenboim for his Deutsche Staatsoper in Berlin. This recording is from a live performance in Amsterdam on September 9, 2000.

"What Next?" is a resolutely modern work -- atonal, non-melodic, without strong emotional weight. Think "Pierrot Lunaire" by Schoenberg. Carter says he aimed for a light tone rather than the heavy poetry he had used previously for vocal works -- anxiety and humor seem to be the two poles, indicating a bemused, detached existential dilemma. The libretto is by Paul Griffiths, the music critic, and is an absurdist scenario a la Samuel Beckett that begins with an auto accident. The five characters, which could be characterized as archetypes -- Earth Mother, Guru, Scientist, Diva and Clown -- although that is my interpretation, converse but fail to connect over 40 minutes, interrupted by one instrumental interlude at the half-way point. The singing is wonderful, the contrapuntal weaving of the voices (two sopranos, contralto, tenor and baritone) is superb, and the Netherlands Radio Chamber Orchestra, Peter Eotvos conducting, is precise and supportive.

The other piece, the 12-minute "Asko Concerto," composed in 2000 for a 16-piece chamber orchestra, is another delightful Carter composition featuring his typical use of different tempos for different instruments creating complex patterns, in this case separated by a recurring ritornello.

The packaging is excellent, typical from ECM -- a booklet including the libretto, notes by Griffith and David Hamilton, and black-and-white photos, is enclosed with the jewel-case in a box.

While not his best works, these are fine additions to Carter's magnificent oeuvre -- on to 100!

Carter wrote this 40-minute one-act opera in 1998, just before he turned 90. It is his one foray onto the stage, though in a sense, he has been writing operas all his life, assigning distinct personalities to the individual instruments in his chamber scores, which he has called "auditory scenarios." Here he does some wonderful things with an absurdist libretto by Paul Griffiths that is at once baffling and obvious. Six characters, gradually reciovering from a car accident, retreat into their own preoccupations rather than doing anything to help one another or rectify their situation. There isn't much conflict, but some of Griffith's observations are thought- provoking, and Carter's vocal writing is richly contrapuntal. The women in the cast make the strongest impressions, esp. contralto Hillary Summers as Stella. As substantial as the opera is, though, the real attraction of the disk is the Asko Concerto, a masterful little chamber symphony that packs a lot of color and drama into its 12-minute length. Some of the instrumental pairings -- violin and trumpet, or piccolo and xyplohone -- are real attention getters, and the studio performance is excellent. I'd never heard the work before, but now I can't get enough of it.

After the American modernist composer Elliott Carter wrote his longest work yet, the "Symphonia: Sux Fluxae Pretium Spei" for orchestra when he well into his 80s, he swiftly embarked on another grandiose project. "What Next?" (1997-8) is a one-act opera with libretto by Paul Griffiths. The music is in Carter's late style, where instruments tend to speak one after the other instead of all at the same time, and there is a great amount of pitched percussion. Far from the monochromatic feel of earlier mature Carter, here the musical lines are of as much variety as the speaking parts. The general mood throughout is humourous, however. Though atonal music has been accused by the conservatives of being appropriate only for the expression of stress or mourning, you'll find no bitter tragedy here.

Unfortunately, the opera may not survive to any kind of classic status, due to its awful libretto by Griffiths. The opera opens with some kind of unspecified disaster (a plane crash? a factory explosion? but probably a car crash) happening offstage. For the entire act, the handful of characters argue about what happened and what they were doing when it happened. The dialogue is clunky and pretenious. It seems like every project Griffiths is involved with gets initial praise and then sinks right into deserved obscurity, like Tan Dun's Grawemeyer-winning opera MARCO POLO or his collaboration with Frances-Marie Uitti There is Still Time.

The disc is filled out by the "ASKO Concerto" (2000), a piece written just after Carter's 91st birthday. This is a sort of concerto grosso, a form Carter became increasingly interested in at the close of the 1990s. His music here, though punctuated with a few brash outbursts, is generally lively and lyrical. A performance by the ASKO Ensemble is available on a Bridge disc, but this performance here by the Netherlands Radio Chamber Orchestra is competitive (funny how Eotvos and company beat the dedicatees to a world premiere recording).

Carter and the human singing voice does not make for an interesting mix,and the definite cloistered "buzz" of opera's paradigms today is even a more a problematically situation.Writing for the voice within the 20th Century has not been a easy task as well, especially with the vigours of dodecaphonic language.Berio has revealed a gift for it, but with large doses of recitation of text, whispering, percussive timbres, babbles,groans and moans,declamatory deliveries. Schoenberg as well tried to remedy this with a more natural delivery of sprechstimme, a situation where text can be developed more fluidly,more hard-edged rhythms can be placed into phrases with greater dimensions,amounts of text to utilize.Carter seems to vault over this history and simply does not know how to write for the voice.He really has never developed an original evolution for the human voice, a creative language,his own vocabulary let's say as he so brilliantly has with instrumental materials, timbre and its structure.Instead this entire opera has that obvious predictable odious East Coast sing-songin almost Broadway vacuousness,a false subjectivity at work, a want-to-be-loved ambience despite Griffiths well crafted text. It is a shame for the instrumental accompaniment is incredible, and that's what you get throughout the proceedings here, instrumental moments, brilliant colors,textures,timbres and gradations of densities, interesting contrapuntal lines, free like percussive moments that sit along side quite naive singin.
Well Carter is not alone all the dodecaphonic practicioners if you think back, their vocal oeuvre is their weakest creative place in dimensions (Babbitt,Shapey,Wolpe,Boulez). The singing in "What Next?" is brilliant but about what?, there is not synergy that occurs in Carter's vocal music either which can help. As Adorno said someplace you pay a price for what you do, and Carter's aesthetic has been strictly magnetized to instrumental and structural polyrhythmic discourse,long durational planning. These are all "structural tools" in the box that does not produce good theatre.Carter should have relied on the lijes of a Robert Wilson or Jonathan Miller that could have seen through the one-dimensional vocal writing of Carter. Whomever thought this work would be good and get off the ground is suffering from a conceit that does no one a service. Carter wasted his well-gifted talents on a work that in the end proved only that he cannot write for the voice and has no genius in theatre. If in fact this work had Schoenbergian :Pierrot:where the singing is parcelled out in fragments and vocable dimensions that would have save this work to some degree, but I was looking for this, and it never materialized.

The :Asko Concerto: is also not as well disposed as his Penthode other chamber works despite the well-balanced playing here the Violin and Trombone solo passages I found were distractions as much as interesting. I think Carter's chamber works, work best when he has an interesting structural agenda to pursue and none really emerges here.