Elliott Carter himself once made a remark about how the great difficulty of his writing did not suit orchestras, which have more limited rehearsal time than a chamber ensemble, and are finished with a work after a few performances. In this case, Boulez brought back the work after its 1970 premiere and played it many times on tour, enough for the orchestra to really get a handle on the thing, making this an important document.
I fondly remember sitting in on a rehearsal of this piece in Servance Hall in Cleveland while I was a student at Case. Boulez was leading the Cleveland Orchestra and Carter was roaming the auditorium score in hand and occasionally calling up to Boulez to signal his intentions at several places during the run-through. I also attended the evening performance. Student tickets were $3. Thanks for posting this performance.
Exciting ,unbelievably imaginative orchestration improbable leaps changes in texture every second is some exciting sound event . Just listen you dont need to understand the sun just revel in it !
This is the recording I've been searching for over a decade! Thank you for the post. This is beautifully played and doesn't even seem that complicated anymore after hearing this over so many times with different interpretations over the past 20 years.
Window Trimmer 4 years ago "At the time, the Boulez performances of this were a great leap forward. So much clarity after the sketchy and diffuse reading of the Concerto by the same orchestra under Bernstein five years earlier." Actually, Carter was quite pleased with the Bernstein performance.
The very fact of Elliott Carter passing amongst us is a phenomenon. Nary a controversy. Nothing untoward said about other composers from Vivaldi to Stockhausen. Hung out with Ives who was clearly a shmuck but was unfazed by that aspect of Ives personality and was grateful for the opportunity. The music itself like Nietsches writings subsumes, assimilates , sublimates and makes advances on everything that has come before it - both were ignored in their lifetime. Nietzsche paid with his sanity at the tender age of 42, spent 14 more years unable to write another word. Carter lived to 104 cranking out major and minor works for the sheer pleasure of what he enjoyed doing. On even the most modern of concert programming one is more likely to encounter a piece from Takemitsu orWourinen.
I love Carter because when I *really* listen he turns my mind into a Mobius strip and smoke comes out my ears. But you have to pay attention, otherwise you lose the thread. LSD might do the same, but it's hard to come by.
I go back and forth on Carter, but the two-minute sequence that starts at 16:20 is really something. It reminds me of transparent overlapping squares of color in one of those late 1950s American modernist paintings.
Carter is a mad genius. The Beethoven of our time. I listen to 20 or more of his works on a consistent basis and have done so over a period of years and years and my appreciation continues to expand and grow. This particular work is majestic, lyrical, poignant, hopeful and joyful beyond measure. Whatever it is he does he does it well and all we have to do is enjoy.
@@stueystuey1962 yeah I really really love him. I'm not sure why I wrote that -- I guess sometimes I go back and forth on the double concerto -- the balance of hapsichord and piano is sort of notorious. you run into things like that occasionally -- I produced a recording of 'syringa' where you have similar issues w/the acoustic guitar, and two singers at the same time. but he towers over the other americans -- just my opinion (not that it's a contest or anything). in a way, I don't think I ever understood atonality until learning his piano sonata 'night fantasies' (not a great title) -- sort of his take on the concord sonata. it's a magnificent piece. so is this.
@@mirandac8712 yeah, I agree. I find the double cto difficult to listen to because of the harpsichord/piano pairing . I love the harpsichord (and especially Carter’s Sonata!), but it just doesn’t work in the cto. I have also felt that the acoustic guitar in Syringa (one of my all-time favorite pieces) was a mistake.
It's very strange to me that i love music as much as i do and yet i am really not an artist of any stripe. My early listening years was all rock-and-roll - Stones, Aerosmith then punk rock and some "Art Rock" mixed in like Brian Eno and Velvet Underground, Joy Division whatever. By the time Nirvana came along I was pretty much a full fledged adult and in my leisure time listened more to "classical" music than the more modern pop culture stuff whatever might have been the rage at the time. What i do know is that Elliott Carter is peer to the greatest composers of all time. What that means for posterity is not so much that his popularity or fan base will grow; it does mean that there will always be people listening to him. For me that is the measure of greatness and importance in any art form and the sciences can be included here too. There are many other serialists and the forerunners of the serialists starting with Schoenberg et al. As much as i enjoy, love and listen often to these composers the only ones i am confident will remain in the catalog are Schoenberg, Webern and Carter. Maderna might but i wouldn't bet on it. AS much as i like Babbitt and Wuorinen i am not as confident about their longevity. It's so subjective but when something reeks of staggering genius all it takes is a handful of devotees to carry the torch. Such is EC.
One of the great orchestral works of the 20th Century. What Carter says about the difficulty level still holds true - sadly, the situation is worse as at 2024. Well, certainly in the UK, half a century after the first performance of Carter’s work.
At the time, the Boulez performances of this were a great leap forward. So much clarity after the sketchy and diffuse reading of the Concerto by the same orchestra under Bernstein five years earlier. (Not that I blame them in the earlier performance, considering this work's nth-degree difficulty.) It took another 20 years before the work finally got the revelatory performance and recording it deserved under Knussen.
Music is so weird; I have a fascination with Xenakis strangely enough (I like textures), but I find Carter`s music totally incomprehensible. Every so often I come back to him after several years thinking I might catch a glimpse of understanding, but I never do. I see comments from those who apparently see something in his music, but I guess I am deaf to it.
@@MorganHayes_Composer.Pianist indeed. I struggle with Xennakis. Certainly I wouldn't claim for X either a lack of genius nor inspiration. And certainly there is no lack of stringent methodology. But the experience of X is much more direct and visceral perhaps even concrete to stretch the physical architectural analogy to the breaking point. EC for me is cerebral, mystical and evasive. Concerto for Orchestra is a colossal masterpiece, a shaky edifice, a sprawling tour de force, like cotton candy melts in my mouth, sticks to my fingers, sickens my stomach, has no nutritional value, is gone before i know it. I am happy, left holding a cardboard baton, and not sure what just happened. And more than anything want to repeat the experience.
There are a few comments here complaining about the intellectual nature of Carter's music, saying it doesn't speak to the heart. All I can say is this: if you listen to just the beginning of his Concerto for Orchestra and don't feel some wonderment at the hushed percussion giving away to the tremelo strings and other instruments joining in, and not see this is the beginning of some epic journey, that is it the oppisite of a mere formal exercise, then you're either willfully not paying attention or you're simply dead inside.Yes, Carter placed strict formal demands on himself-so did Bach, perhaps even more so. If I may be very old fashioned, I have to say the greats are the ones who speak directly while putting the greatest strictures on themselves: they find the form to suit their emotions.
I like his music. I look back at my posts. Silliness. Greatest composer of all time. Hands down. But webern once in a while,; now and again Schoenberg. Id be remiss if i leave out Babbitt. But seriously Carter da best.
I have always been surprised bt the "concerto for orchestra" in XXth Centuury. IN my mind, they should be like "concerting symphonies" in the XVIII° century, except that the solosits ssohould not be fixed at the beginning, but should evolve all along the Concrto. But id I hear the classical concertos for orchestra : Hindemith, Bartok, Lutoslawski, this one - thiese concertind aspcts exist somehow, but are much less emphasized than for instance a solo from the concerting instrument in a traditional or modern concerto. Probably the experience of the modern composers push them to write these concertos for orchestra in such a less brillant way.
@@Empyreanabove I do not thaink that you can say such a thing. We still lack some time to fully azppreciate Carter's style, which is stilll harder for our ears. . They are compltely different, but I think that it is to soon to rank them. Carter worked on very specific concepts like differentiation and reconcilation of several dimesions of the musicaal alnguage. This is particularly clear for inbstance in his "triple duo", which starts with a given coupling of instruments and ends with another coupling. This is a very simple example of much more complex situations as we can find in his string quarters, for instance.
"We lack some time", do we....redolent of Carters arrogant notion that the uneducated hoi-polloi of today couldn't understand his great works but the more evolved people of the future would. Bluntly, these are intellectual exercises that go over the heads of all but the Serial music cognoscenti. Bartok wrote for the many and his music is enjoyed by many. Carter and others of his ilk like Babbitt (who actually was frank in stating that his music was for experts) wrote for the few
One doesn't listen to Carter to be moved in any profound way musically. His music seems to me to be a fascinating intellectual excursion. Every few years I listen to this piece or his Variations for Orchestra. Sometimes the Piano Concerto. If I want to be moved, I listen to Romantic, tonal composers, such as Rachmaninoff, my favorite.
there is not one carter orchestral work - including this one - that is in the international repertoire of orchestras. not one. that's not to say that he isn't performed now and again. but carter, like many other composers who came to prominence after world war 2, are known mainly through recordings. and that's how much of that repertoire will be known.
Give it time. Schoenbergs works - widely regarded as masterpieces of the western tradition - are in some instances over 100 years old - and are still crowded out by the schuman piano concerto, Dvorak symphonies, and the like in the average concert hall. 50 years from now yt commenters will lament that all one hears are those old musty carter and Messaien works!
@@stueystuey1962 Only the early works of Schoenberg are heard in the concert hall- the tonal and atonal works. But the serial works? Very, very few; maybe a performance of the piano concerto, now and again.
You are manifestly wrong. There are so obviously any number of enthusiasts who "know" from experience that EC is a genius. That guarantees listeners and that will be passed from generation to generation. It is the conviction of the listeners not the number that guarantees its worthiness and longevity. In fact EC is one of only a few composers post 1950 for which this is a certainty.
Nothing is a certainty and no one is wrong. But I suspect this: there have been very few performances, if any, of his orchestral works this year. That goes for the quartets and vocal works as well. Those who own recordings or have access to UA-cam can listen to his music. But none of his works are in the general repertoire of regular orchestras, quartets, or singers. There might be a few of the short piano works that have been used as encores. @@stueystuey1962
Elliott Carter himself once made a remark about how the great difficulty of his writing did not suit orchestras, which have more limited rehearsal time than a chamber ensemble, and are finished with a work after a few performances. In this case, Boulez brought back the work after its 1970 premiere and played it many times on tour, enough for the orchestra to really get a handle on the thing, making this an important document.
I fondly remember sitting in on a rehearsal of this piece in Servance Hall in Cleveland while I was a student at Case. Boulez was leading the Cleveland Orchestra and Carter was roaming the auditorium score in hand and occasionally calling up to Boulez to signal his intentions at several places during the run-through. I also attended the evening performance. Student tickets were $3. Thanks for posting this performance.
Exciting ,unbelievably imaginative orchestration improbable leaps changes in texture every second is some exciting sound event . Just listen you dont need to understand the sun just revel in it !
This is the recording I've been searching for over a decade! Thank you for the post. This is beautifully played and doesn't even seem that complicated anymore after hearing this over so many times with different interpretations over the past 20 years.
Thank you.
Window Trimmer
4 years ago
"At the time, the Boulez performances of this were a great leap forward. So much clarity after the sketchy and diffuse reading of the Concerto by the same orchestra under Bernstein five years earlier." Actually, Carter was quite pleased with the Bernstein performance.
The very fact of Elliott Carter passing amongst us is a phenomenon. Nary a controversy. Nothing untoward said about other composers from Vivaldi to Stockhausen. Hung out with Ives who was clearly a shmuck but was unfazed by that aspect of Ives personality and was grateful for the opportunity. The music itself like Nietsches writings subsumes, assimilates , sublimates and makes advances on everything that has come before it - both were ignored in their lifetime. Nietzsche paid with his sanity at the tender age of 42, spent 14 more years unable to write another word. Carter lived to 104 cranking out major and minor works for the sheer pleasure of what he enjoyed doing. On even the most modern of concert programming one is more likely to encounter a piece from Takemitsu orWourinen.
I love Carter because when I *really* listen he turns my mind into a Mobius strip and smoke comes out my ears. But you have to pay attention, otherwise you lose the thread. LSD might do the same, but it's hard to come by.
Yeah. To use internweb vernacular: swim (someone who isn't me) says try both at once!
I go back and forth on Carter, but the two-minute sequence that starts at 16:20 is really something. It reminds me of transparent overlapping squares of color in one of those late 1950s American modernist paintings.
Carter is a mad genius. The Beethoven of our time. I listen to 20 or more of his works on a consistent basis and have done so over a period of years and years and my appreciation continues to expand and grow. This particular work is majestic, lyrical, poignant, hopeful and joyful beyond measure. Whatever it is he does he does it well and all we have to do is enjoy.
@@stueystuey1962 yeah I really really love him. I'm not sure why I wrote that -- I guess sometimes I go back and forth on the double concerto -- the balance of hapsichord and piano is sort of notorious. you run into things like that occasionally -- I produced a recording of 'syringa' where you have similar issues w/the acoustic guitar, and two singers at the same time.
but he towers over the other americans -- just my opinion (not that it's a contest or anything). in a way, I don't think I ever understood atonality until learning his piano sonata 'night fantasies' (not a great title) -- sort of his take on the concord sonata. it's a magnificent piece. so is this.
@@mirandac8712 yeah, I agree. I find the double cto difficult to listen to because of the harpsichord/piano pairing . I love the harpsichord (and especially Carter’s Sonata!), but it just doesn’t work in the cto. I have also felt that the acoustic guitar in Syringa (one of my all-time favorite pieces) was a mistake.
It's very strange to me that i love music as much as i do and yet i am really not an artist of any stripe. My early listening years was all rock-and-roll - Stones, Aerosmith then punk rock and some "Art Rock" mixed in like Brian Eno and Velvet Underground, Joy Division whatever. By the time Nirvana came along I was pretty much a full fledged adult and in my leisure time listened more to "classical" music than the more modern pop culture stuff whatever might have been the rage at the time. What i do know is that Elliott Carter is peer to the greatest composers of all time. What that means for posterity is not so much that his popularity or fan base will grow; it does mean that there will always be people listening to him. For me that is the measure of greatness and importance in any art form and the sciences can be included here too. There are many other serialists and the forerunners of the serialists starting with Schoenberg et al. As much as i enjoy, love and listen often to these composers the only ones i am confident will remain in the catalog are Schoenberg, Webern and Carter. Maderna might but i wouldn't bet on it. AS much as i like Babbitt and Wuorinen i am not as confident about their longevity. It's so subjective but when something reeks of staggering genius all it takes is a handful of devotees to carry the torch. Such is EC.
One of the great orchestral works of the 20th Century. What Carter says about the difficulty level still holds true - sadly, the situation is worse as at 2024. Well, certainly in the UK, half a century after the first performance of Carter’s work.
Wonderful!
At the time, the Boulez performances of this were a great leap forward. So much clarity after the sketchy and diffuse reading of the Concerto by the same orchestra under Bernstein five years earlier. (Not that I blame them in the earlier performance, considering this work's nth-degree difficulty.) It took another 20 years before the work finally got the revelatory performance and recording it deserved under Knussen.
Boulez & Knussen come closest to the letter of the law. Bernstein and Gielen come closest to the spirit of the thing.
Bernsteins recording aint bad. It was considered unplayable at the time. Oops.
Music is so weird; I have a fascination with Xenakis strangely enough (I like textures), but I find Carter`s music totally incomprehensible. Every so often I come back to him after several years thinking I might catch a glimpse of understanding, but I never do. I see comments from those who apparently see something in his music, but I guess I am deaf to it.
and can get into xenakis? wierd ears maniacal one.
@@alexreik424 I can see that might be. Xenakis’s music strikes me as more direct/visceral than Carter.
@@MorganHayes_Composer.Pianist indeed. I struggle with Xennakis. Certainly I wouldn't claim for X either a lack of genius nor inspiration. And certainly there is no lack of stringent methodology. But the experience of X is much more direct and visceral perhaps even concrete to stretch the physical architectural analogy to the breaking point. EC for me is cerebral, mystical and evasive. Concerto for Orchestra is a colossal masterpiece, a shaky edifice, a sprawling tour de force, like cotton candy melts in my mouth, sticks to my fingers, sickens my stomach, has no nutritional value, is gone before i know it. I am happy, left holding a cardboard baton, and not sure what just happened. And more than anything want to repeat the experience.
@@stueystuey1962 a vivid description!
Some composers just don’t appeal to some listeners. At least you gave this an open-minded listen, which is much more than most.
There are a few comments here complaining about the intellectual nature of Carter's music, saying it doesn't speak to the heart. All I can say is this: if you listen to just the beginning of his Concerto for Orchestra and don't feel some wonderment at the hushed percussion giving away to the tremelo strings and other instruments joining in, and not see this is the beginning of some epic journey, that is it the oppisite of a mere formal exercise, then you're either willfully not paying attention or you're simply dead inside.Yes, Carter placed strict formal demands on himself-so did Bach, perhaps even more so. If I may be very old fashioned, I have to say the greats are the ones who speak directly while putting the greatest strictures on themselves: they find the form to suit their emotions.
Gran control de las masas sonoras
I like his music. I look back at my posts. Silliness. Greatest composer of all time. Hands down. But webern once in a while,; now and again Schoenberg. Id be remiss if i leave out Babbitt. But seriously Carter da best.
I have always been surprised bt the "concerto for orchestra" in XXth Centuury. IN my mind, they should be like "concerting symphonies" in the XVIII° century, except that the solosits ssohould not be fixed at the beginning, but should evolve all along the Concrto. But id I hear the classical concertos for orchestra : Hindemith, Bartok, Lutoslawski, this one - thiese concertind aspcts exist somehow, but are much less emphasized than for instance a solo from the concerting instrument in a traditional or modern concerto. Probably the experience of the modern composers push them to write these concertos for orchestra in such a less brillant way.
As a massive Bartok fan, I can safely say that this Concerto For Orchestra gives even Bartok's CFO a run for its money :)
Carter isn'y worthy to shine Bartok's shoes.
@Paul best Do not forget Lutoslawski. His concerto belings to his first period, but is full of great ideas.
@@Empyreanabove I do not thaink that you can say such a thing. We still lack some time to fully azppreciate Carter's style, which is stilll harder for our ears.
. They are compltely different, but I think that it is to soon to rank them.
Carter worked on very specific concepts like differentiation and reconcilation of several dimesions of the musicaal alnguage. This is particularly clear for inbstance in his "triple duo", which starts with a given coupling of instruments and ends with another coupling. This is a very simple example of much more complex situations as we can find in his string quarters, for instance.
"We lack some time", do we....redolent of Carters arrogant notion that the uneducated hoi-polloi of today couldn't understand his great works but the more evolved people of the future would. Bluntly, these are intellectual exercises that go over the heads of all but the Serial music cognoscenti. Bartok wrote for the many and his music is enjoyed by many. Carter and others of his ilk like Babbitt (who actually was frank in stating that his music was for experts) wrote for the few
More like ten thousand years. Actually his status one hundred years from now will be like that of , say, Manuel Ponce today.
One doesn't listen to Carter to be moved in any profound way musically. His music seems to me to be a fascinating intellectual excursion. Every few years I listen to this piece or his Variations for Orchestra. Sometimes the Piano Concerto. If I want to be moved, I listen to Romantic, tonal composers, such as Rachmaninoff, my favorite.
Change one to you...pretty sure you are speaking of yourself.
Speak for yourself. I listen to Carter to be moved, fascinated, dazzled, delighted. Rachmaninoff is vulgar when he isn’t boring. You can keep him.
there is not one carter orchestral work - including this one - that is in the international repertoire of orchestras. not one. that's not to say that he isn't performed now and again.
but carter, like many other composers who came to prominence after world war 2, are known mainly through recordings. and that's how much of that repertoire will be known.
Naturally! Selecting works by Carter would be the perfect way of emptying a concert hall.
Give it time. Schoenbergs works - widely regarded as masterpieces of the western tradition - are in some instances over 100 years old - and are still crowded out by the schuman piano concerto, Dvorak symphonies, and the like in the average concert hall. 50 years from now yt commenters will lament that all one hears are those old musty carter and Messaien works!
@@stueystuey1962 Only the early works of Schoenberg are heard in the concert hall- the tonal and atonal works. But the serial works? Very, very few; maybe a performance of the piano concerto, now and again.
@window trimmer.....yes..knussen!
Another work for the dust heap.
You are manifestly wrong. There are so obviously any number of enthusiasts who "know" from experience that EC is a genius. That guarantees listeners and that will be passed from generation to generation. It is the conviction of the listeners not the number that guarantees its worthiness and longevity. In fact EC is one of only a few composers post 1950 for which this is a certainty.
Nothing is a certainty and no one is wrong. But I suspect this: there have been very few performances, if any, of his orchestral works this year. That goes for the quartets and vocal works as well. Those who own recordings or have access to UA-cam can listen to his music. But none of his works are in the general repertoire of regular orchestras, quartets, or singers. There might be a few of the short piano works that have been used as encores. @@stueystuey1962