Customer Reviews

Elliott Carter: String Quartets Nos. 1 & 2

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Elliott Carter's first two string quartets are modernist manifestos, works that combine a penetrating comprehension of the format with beautifully articulated avant-garde concepts.

This is the only recording of these works in print, I believe. One of the few, at least. The Composers Quartet ensures that anyone introduced to Carter's quartets by this recording with not be disappointed (unless they are dull). These are excellent performances (the recordings were done under Carter's supervision) and the price is good, so apart from the obvious allure of it being perhaps the only in-print performances of these works, it has other advantages. Both compositions demand the highest level of intellectual and technical virtuosity, levels beyond most ensembles, but this group wields the material powerfully. The recording quality is pretty good, although less sharp than the Julliard Quartet's release of Carter's first four quartets (which is unfortunately OOP). However, compared to that release, the CQ's performance of quartet no.1 is substantially better and faster, with keener rhythms and delineation of texture.

Regarding these works themselves, they are some of the greatest quartets of the era. I only like a few other 20th century quartets more than Carter's first and third. The first quartet on this recording are based on Carter's ideas of metrical modulation, the rhythmic characteristics of each instrument's parts manipulated independently. It is a fantastic work, and it demands much from both performer and listener. The Pulitzer prize-winning second quartet is a formidable work in which each of the four instruments is played with different parameters. The musical gestures unfold in a series of confrontations and ordered coordination, with main movements bridged by mini-concerto-like cadenzas for viola, cello, and violin. Here too Carter employs mad rhythmic complexity, as in the first, although it is given much different context. It's brilliantly original and ineffably dramatic.

Highly recommended!

A fine performance. For many flattering words on this recording, check out the reviews for the Julliard Quartet box set of the 4 Carter 4tets.

Very curious listening again returning to this one of the first recordings, (there is another from University of Illinois Urbana) but this one has, still retains many profound qualities for music no one had ever heard, I mean put yourself back into the late Sixties when you first perhaps heard the First Quartet, and how much can you truthfully say you comprehended,understood with some degree of conviction. The opponent here I guess is the Arditti readings, although those were part of their first USA Tour, the late Eighties,so the readings were somewhat tenuous,and not "risk-taking" as we would find today, and as we usually find within the Arditti language of interpretative visions. They are a bit cold,all that modernity does that to ones constitution; matter-a-fact playing most of the time,almost "flip-a-switch" motion ostinato.So this makes their Carter all the more compelling, for overly emotional simply doesn't work.The Juilliard Quartet find a nice balance between intellect and the heart or the gut, the testasterone part engaged.But I've heard Brahmsian detritus,rotundities from the Carter Quintets, one with Strings and Piano another with Winds and Piano.( Mr. Barenboim is the culpret, too much Wagner,Bruckner and Strauss in his interpretive diet.) Here though on this CD there are some fine desolate places, threadbare,abandoned that was an important part to what we can refer to as "post-early" Carter, beyond his "Pochantas Days". I certainly like the sul ponticello this group gets, marvelously placed in this First Quartet. There may be too much "image", too much wanting to find a narrative, or some programmatic element to help weed and make comprehensible all this desolate,thorny,strident music together. The First Quartet in retrospect now is really surface bound, no deep mysteries anymore, the individual part role playing, the music materials assigned to specific players,(Violins sclaes, the cello points of punctuation, the viola anti-rhythmic threes and fives) at specific times and places, inhabiting their own musical lanaguage, and the infamous "metric modulation" "old hat" now today, is there anything more simpler in concept than this?. There is also a grittiness to the overall sound here, I don't know if that is the state of technical in-expertise of the times or the real playing, I suspect a little of both. This makes one admire this recording,and these musicians for the players hear retain, take into themselves Carter's deep vision of this First Quartet. The Second Quartet as well, more classical in shape in motion, less extroverted and less everything, less expansive, almost like Carter was "shell-shocked" by what he did/accomplished in the First Quartet.You may come to prefer this recording to all others, as you listen. It finds an emotive place someplace between the cold and abstract and the more comprehensible romantic surface that Carter never seems to quite lift his aesthetic from, even his octagenarian solos, and "Night Fantasies" spring from the unforgotten past of nostalgia and reverance for that which can never be.