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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
28 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Essential Elliott Carter,
By Joe Barron (Philadelphia, PA,) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Elliott Carter: Sonata for Flute, Oboe, Cello & Harpsichord; Sonata for Cello & Piano; Double Concerto for Harpsichor (Audio CD)
Carter has been composing so much good music over the last decade that it's easy to forget he was writing classics before many of us were born. The pieces on this disk are a case in point--two generations of musicians have grown up since the earliest of them, the Cello Sonata, appeared in 1948. The sonata has been recorded probably more often than any other of Carter's works. New performances are appearing almost every day, but it's hard to see how they can better Joel Krosnick's warm, fluent interpretation. The rendition of the Sonata for Flute, Oboe, Cello, and Harpsichord is the best of several available--exuberant, dancelike, unbuttoned--and the performance of the Double Concerto is the only one available at present. That would scandal if the playing weren't so supple and sensitive. This disk is essential Carter: three masterpieces, each from a different decade, and each one a milestone in the composer's development. It is the one CD I would recommend to anyone approaching Carter's mature work for the first time.
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The 'Bach' of the Twenty-second Century?,
By Giordano Bruno (Wherever I am, I am.) - See all my reviews (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER) (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Elliott Carter: Sonata for Flute, Oboe, Cello & Harpsichord; Sonata for Cello & Piano; Double Concerto for Harpsichor (Audio CD)
Like J.S. Bach in his own lifetime, Elliot Carter has a reputation as an 'intellectual' composer, a stubborn conservative indifferent to the fashionable tastes of his contemporary audiences. Both reputations are just; neither Bach nor Carter made many concessions to fashion, and in both composers, it's the intellectual depth of the music that will make it perennially meaningful to future audiences. No composers have ever more systematically explored and expanded the harmonic vocabulary and theory of their eras than Bach and Carter. It will take some generations, I think, before the rest of us catch up with Carter's tonal brilliance.
So let me proclaim it: Elliot Carter is the greatest American composer ever. I'm not totally alone in that assessment, though others are less forthright about it. Despite being the composer's composer, however, Carter has never captured much 'market share' of popular audience. One reason, I think, is that he offers very little mystique - no transcendental bells and whistles - very little managed care for the emotions, and hardly anything you could dance to. So what is Elliot Carter's music about? Like Bach's Art of Fugue, Carter's music is about the possibilities of music. The three compositions on this CD are ravishingly beautiful music for the mind as well as the ears. The oldest of them, the Sonata for Cello and Piano (1948), starts from the realization that the two instruments are utterly dissimilar in their sonic capabilities. Carter sends each of them on a high-energy exploration of those capabilities, probing their harmonics and dynamics. Both parts are extremely virtuosic; they were regarded as unplayable when first published, a notion that cellist Joel Krosnick and pianist Paul Jacobs put to rest. The Sonata for Flute, Oboe, Cello, and Harpsichord (1952) marks a transition in Carter's work from his excitement over the still-uncharted possibilities of harmony and tonality to a new excitement over the rhythmic 'opportunities' of European music to incorporate influences from jazz, from Asian, and from Indian music. Just as he spent the first half of his long career exploring pitches and scales, Carter has spent the second half extending the rhythmic vocabulary of his music. One of the hallmarks of his later style is the use of polyrhythms and the assignment of quite distinct rhythms to different instruments of his ensembles. His Double Concerto, recorded on this CD, is a percussionist's idea of paradise, a summa theologica of counter rhythms and percussive uses of silence. Two of the compositions on this CD include prominent parts for harpsichord. The Double Concerto for Harpsichord and Piano with Two Chamber Orchestras is exactly as unique and inventive as its name suggests. Carter treats the harpsichord not as a precursor of the piano but as a radically different instrument, with its own proper timbres and touch. The harpsichord played here is NOT a copy of a Baroque instrument; it's a hopped-up modern machine with all sorts of registers, hard and soft plectra, couplings, etc. Be sure you have good separation on your sound system for this piece of music. The spatial relations between the two orchestras and the two keyboards are an exciting feature of the sound. Elliot Carter was born in 1908. At last notice, he is still composing. To speak of the two 50-year halves of his career is not an exaggeration. If you've never or seldom listened to Carter's music, this CD will be a fine introduction to it. The performers' enthusiasm can be heard in every passage. If you already know and enjoy Carter's string quartet or symphonic music, you'll find these three pieces representative of his most original art.
9 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A good place to start with Carter,
By A Customer
This review is from: Elliott Carter: Sonata for Flute, Oboe, Cello & Harpsichord; Sonata for Cello & Piano; Double Concerto for Harpsichor (Audio CD)
Carter is considered to be perhaps the greatest living composer, and I didn't know any of his music, so after browsing the internet (and in particular,Amazon) for a place to start, I obtained this CD. I have been delighted with it. All of this music takes some acclimation, but that's the nice thing about a CD--you can stick a CD of new music in the car stereo and play it as often as you need to until it starts to reveal its treasures. In the case of this CD, all three works are rich in complexity and have required quite a bit of listening, but the effort was well worth it--two of the three works have revealed lots of treasures. The Cello Sonata is full of wonderful, even magical moments. The Sonata for Flute, Oboe... has been only slightly less rewarding. I like its playfulness. The only work on this disc that has proved resistant so far is the Double Concerto. Carter's unique twist on tonality that makes the other works so interesting seems to have disappeared in the Double Concerto, written later in his career, and I haven't found much to like in it. But the CD is worth obtaining for the two sonatas. They are great works.
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