Customer Reviews

Elliott Carter: Piano Concerto

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

 

 

Oppens and Gielen did a 'remake' of the Piano Concerto eight years later. That performance (on Arte Nova with the SWF orchestra) is a bit better - Oppens gets more of the notes, and Gielen has a better grasp of how the big gestures work. (Also, the timpani don't constantly drown out the orchestra like they do here.) The Arte Nova release comes at a super-budget price, too.

Don't know the Variations for Orchestra well enough to have an opinion, but the competition seems strong (especially Levine/Chicago).

There are three performances available of Elliott Carter's great Piano Conerto (two with Ursula Oppens as soloist and Michael Gielen conducting), and this one is the best of the lot. The others may be more accurate or more clearly engineered, as some other reviewers here have stated, but this one is the most gripping. (Reviewing the live concert, critic Andrew Porter called it a performance of the highest order.) The difference? The wonderful playing of the Cincinnati Symphony and the seven-member concertino with which Carter surrounds the soloist. Despite all the talk about Carter's recent "Indian summer" --- composing past the age of 90 --- my favorite music of his comes from his 20-year "high modernist" period, from the Second Quartet of 1959 through the Night Fantasies of 1980. The Piano Concerto, written in the mid-60s, is a masterpiece in a series of masterpieces and one of Carter's most powerful scores. It is a brutal, tragic, heartbreaking work in which the orchestra seems to beat the soloist down just as she begins to take wing. The playing of the orchestral soloists is beautifully phrased, particularly Phillip Ruder's searing, fluent violin. The music goes by really fast, and requires careful, intense listening, but both the concerto and the performance reward the effort. Longtime Carter champion Ursula Oppens has made the work a specialty and has worked closely with the composer in shaping her perfromance. She is flawless.

The Variations from 1954 is a good introduction to Carter's mature orchestral writing --- less initially daunting than the concerto --- and Gielen gives an exciting, insightful account. Carter expert David Schiff has said that the piece really belongs to the more conservative tradition of the Great American Symphonies of Copland and William Schuman, and, in his view, it outdoes them both. Who am I to argue?

Nietzsche described himself as a post-humous philosopher - and meant more with that than simply a defiant and perhaps unoriginal response of a genius to its being misunderstood until long after their demise. But that is well enough to think about in terms of Carter's music. The Piano Concerto in particular is a monumental work in classical music in the 20th century. Intellectually and structurally (if perhaps never emotionally) it will one day be considered on par with any of Beethoven's Piano Concertos.

When listening to Carter, you do it for a few reasons: As an intellectual excercise, in order to satisfy the fire of pretension burning inside ye (not the worst of motivations to pursue high art, if I may add) or simply for the rythmical and structural delight that is clearly audible. This also means that Carter is not Sunday-morning family-brunch listening. You spouse may pour hot coffee over you, your children might want to move out. But a Scotch, a nice Chair, a Thursday evening - and Carter can reveal as much and more than any other modern composer can.

The recording on Arte Nova is indeed a notch better, but it lacks the coupeling. Either are well worth getting - and given that one approaches them with the right openness and expectations, will only reward... and richly so.

These two compositions would be on my short list of 20th Century symphonic masterpieces. Everything about this album is perfect: from the evocative cover art, the insightful album notes, to Gielen's impressive interpretation. While traditionalists are wont to belittle Carter's work as unapproachable and unpleasant to the ear, they miss the essential: Carter was first and foremost, as was his life-long mentor Charles Ives, an individualist. Neither of these two great American composers wrote their music to please the audience. And in fact, both of these great works are approachable, highly approachable, and admirable, as long as you come to them with an open mind and with ears willing to hear some "non-sissy" music (Ives' words, not mine). Carter's music, like Ives', will open up new realms to anyone who is willing to approach this music with a sufficient degree of openness and willingness to be challenged. There is little doubt in my mind that Carter will come to be regarded as second only to Ives in American music of the 20th Century.

OK, let's be clear from the start: I know what I know, but I don't know more than that. Maybe "History" will tell us that this is one of the 20th Century's Greatest Concertos. But personally, I hope not. And I don't think it will. First of all, I think there's an abrupt rhetorical shift between the first and second movements. The second has all these "real music" moments:the piano part breaking down to one repeated note, a phrase in the english horn being repeated obviously by the piano, obvious antiphonal play between the orchestra and the piano...like that. While the first is this abstract scurrying up and down for the bulk of its length. It's like Carter went to hear a couple of Classical Concertos between the composition of the first and second movements and came back to his Berlin pad and said "Oh yeah...That". Often behind very abstract things, I discover very banal everyday thinking. And I'm feelin' that a bit here. And I'm especially feeling that in the Variations. But I also can sense a certain crisis of language there. The Variations is a much more transparent piece. There's really no particular problem in following the argument. Every marker liner - note writer David Schiff says is there, is there. And in almost every case, Carter's piece is inferior to its models. Even those awful American symphonists (that bombastic ending!), because they were more sincere. So Carter, in his forties, still had to carve out a niche for himself. And carve he did. Even though he had already written his real breakthough piece (the First String Quartet), he still wasn't 100% his own man. Whereas the Piano Concerto is pure, unadulterated Carter. All his little rhythmic and harmonic games. All that intellectual baggage in the discourse and the rhetoric. The world will never recover from the scene in The Sopranos where the couple is sitting around doing the Times crossword puzzle and listening to the Webern Piano Variations - that's what the first movement makes me think of. Who remembers that Nonesuch liner note where it said that Carter relaxes by conjugating irregular Italian verbs?

The performances seem very good to me. I've always liked Michael Gielen as a conductor. And Ursula Oppens rocks that New Music Piano repertoire. Maybe there ARE better performances out there - I'll trust you on that one...

3 1/2 Stars: half a star taken off for personal taste - so sue me.

This is not the strongest Carter disc, but it is well worth hearing for the "Variations for Orchestra" (1945-5 -- 22'17). The live recording from 10/22/85 captures Michael Gielen leading the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra in that city's Music Hall. The recording quality is not great, and there is a fair amount of distracting coughing, but this seems to be the only readily available recording (James Levine's recording with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra would be nice to hear!). "Variations," written shortly after Carter's breakthrough to his mature style with the "Cello Sonata" of 1948 and the "String Quartet No. 1" of 1951, is an attempt to synthesize everything Carter had absorbed up to that point. There are three themes, one a twelve-tone row, that move across the entire work, which begins with an introduction and the theme, moves through nine variations grouped in threes, and then a coda/finale.

Here is David Schiff's summary from the liner notes: "Variation 1 is light and fast; 2 is heavy and slow; 3 combines the previous two. Variation 4 is a continuous ritardando; 5, the eye of the storm, is a motionless study in shadowy sonorities; 6 is a continuous accelerando. Variation 7 juxtaposes three distinct kinds of music in the woodwinds, brass and strings, respectively; 8 continues the woodwind idea over a jazzy scherzando; 9 superimposes the three elements of 7 over a frightening clocklike pulse (a transformation of the jazz beat of Variation 8). The Introduction, Theme and Coda (emergence, presence and dissolution) form yet another three-part grouping framing the whole."

I've listened to this 10/84 studio recording of the "Piano Concerto (1964-5 -- 22'35) many times since 2002, and I've never worked up any enthusiasm for it. The Arte Nova disc, also with Gielen and Oppens, recorded eight years later in 1992, is much better, and it's just been reissued -- see my review.

Carter's orchestral works deserve more and better recordings! It would be nice if the world's best orchestras and conductors would take a break now and then from their Mahler Olympics and compete to produce the finest versions of Carter's "Concerto for Orchestra," "Variations for Orchestra," "Symphony of Three Orchestras," and "Symphonia."

THis was a difficult one to rate. One has to balance the fine technical merits of the recording - clear, crisp and brilliant sound in the manner of most "modern" music - with the music itsef. And that is what one must eventually face.

When the concerto was performed locally, a mounting sense of dread filled the hall as the conductor launched into a pre-music explanation of what was to come. You know something is not quite right when a work of art must be "explained" to those who choose to view or listen to it. Despite many efforts and lots of good intentions, it still reminds one of a score for a suspense film. An interesting score, to be assured, but nothing that will have the listener humming on the way home. In the preparatory talk we were asked not to become wedded to the idea that music was synonymous with melody. Based on our evolutionary psychology, this is an almost impossible request. After all, throughout history music has been almost exclusively an emotionally - rather than an intellectual - exercise.

Despite the pleading that this is "music for the ages" it's not really music for a concert hall. For one, it sounds sterile, dry...intellectual, witty and post-modern are descriptive words that come to mind. Great effort but this is one I would pass up.