Carter

[naturlaut]

Since Alistair brought up Carter in the Berio thread, I thought it'd be a good excuse to start a Carter thread.  Aside from the concerto I have not dug deep into his music. 

I am sure Retrouvailles has a lot to share about Retrouvailles.

Discuss.

[ahinton]

Since Alistair brought up Carter in the Berio thread, I thought it'd be a good excuse to start a Carter thread.  Aside from the concerto I have not dug deep into his music. 

I am sure Retrouvailles has a lot to share about Retrouvailles.

Discuss.

It is perhaps worth mentioning that at least two earlier Carter threads have been initiated on this forum to my knowledge.

Best,

Alistair

[ryguillian]

Since Alistair brought up Carter in the Berio thread, I thought it'd be a good excuse to start a Carter thread. 

I don't think you need an excuse to start a Carter thread. But a mention by Alistair is excuse enough for me!

Aside from the concerto I have not dug deep into his music. 

Carter has written more than one piece in which the word "concerto" appears in the title (i.e., a double concerto for piano & orchestra, a piano concerto, a concerto for orchestra, an oboe concerto, a violin concerto, a clarinet concerto, a cello concerto, a horn concerto, and most recently a flute concerto), so I'm not sure what you're referring to with "the concerto", but I assume (by popularity) that you're referring to either the Piano Concerto or the Concerto for Orchestra. I really like both works, especially the Piano Concerto which is hands-down one of the best piano concertos of the 20th century (and easily one of the most difficult). The attention to detail in Carter's works really amazes me, especially considered against how prolific his output is. One might be tempted to call his works formulaic (and some are more than others), but only if one also extends this description to Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart as well.

I am sure Retrouvailles has a lot to share about Retrouvailles.

Actually, and I hope he doesn't mind I speak for him, I don't think he really cares for this work very much.

Discuss.

Done.

Best,

Ryan

[ryguillian]

It is perhaps worth mentioning that at least two earlier Carter threads have been initiated on this forum to my knowledge.

Best,

Alistair

I thought it was Piano Street's modus operandi to keep the signal to noise ratio quite low & to keep redundancy at a maximum. I mean if there were ever data loss... well, we'd want to protect ourselves against that! 

Best,

Ryan

[ahinton]

I don't think you need an excuse to start a Carter thread. But a mention by Alistair is excuse enough for me!

Carter has written more than one piece in which the word "concerto" appears in the title (i.e., a double concerto for piano & orchestra, a piano concerto, a concerto for orchestra, an oboe concerto, a violin concerto, a clarinet concerto, a cello concerto, a horn concerto, and most recently a flute concerto), so I'm not sure what you're referring to with "the concerto", but I assume (by popularity) that you're referring to either the Piano Concerto or the Concerto for Orchestra. I really like both works, especially the Piano Concerto which is hands-down one of the best piano concertos of the 20th century (and easily one of the most difficult). The attention to detail in Carter's works really amazes me, especially considered against how prolific his output is. One might be tempted to call his works formulaic (and some are more than others), but only if one also extends this description to Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart as well.

How refreshingly pleasant (especially after some of the exchanges here- and thereabouts) to be able to agree with your wholeheartedly and in all particulars! The Concerto for Orchestra is for me one of the great orchestral works of the 20th century and I would personally value it above the piano concerto, for all that I have now finally gotten to this splendid piece. Carter's one-time much-vaunted "complexity" has never done a thing for me, because I never felt that he was interested in any such thing for its own sake in the first place, any more than that very different composer Sorabji was; Carter at his fabulous best gets right to the heart of the matter and has the wonderful capacity to excite, stimulate and get all the emotional juices going. OK, I don't see eye to eye with everything of his by any means (and if ever I get within a few light-years of his Third Quartet I'll be amazed), but the sheer humanity that informs what he does is what will keep him in the forefront of people's attention for many years to come, I think - and it may well also be what will keep him going at it for as long as he has new things to say (and there most fortunately seems to be no let up in that!).

Best,

Alistair

[ryguillian]

if ever I get within a few light-years of his Third Quartet I'll be amazed

I've heard Carter's 3rd quartet was pretty challenging, but I didn't know it was that formidable. Do you know much about the piece?

Best,

Ryan

[ryguillian]

It's nowhere near his best piece, so it's much more difficult to find esoteric reasons to think it's greater than it is.

Re: your first clause. I occasionally deploy the term “one of the best”, but I find that if one gets more specific in establishing “hierarchies of greatness” such superlative relationships become fuzzy at best.

Re: your second clause. You seem to be positing the existence of a group that frivolously holds in high esteem works that aren't good while finding “esoteric”—known only to this hypothetical group?—reasons to fool themselves into thinking that these works are greater than they are (while simultaneously knowing [by traversing the aforementioned “hierarchy of greatness” of course] their “true” rank in the order of things). What about the reverse? Are people who rightfully know a piece's order in the rank of greatness also engaging in some auto-subterfuge whereby they inflate a great piece's greatness even further? I find all of this rather untenable.

In any case, the question and statement were meant for response by Alistair.

Best,

Ryan

[naturlaut]

I meant the piano concerto (the one commissioned and premiered by Lateiner), which I have known since my student days.  In what ways do you find the 3rd quartet difficult?  The idea of "two separate pieces" isn't new; I could discern the two duos at times, but there are also confusing moments for me.  What do you think of the other quartets?

Coming back to piano works, I actually find Retrouvailles an effective work. 

[ahinton]

I've heard Carter's 3rd quartet was pretty challenging, but I didn't know it was that formidable. Do you know much about the piece?

The "double duo" aspect of it in terms of how it is put together is not really what bothers me the most, although it has to be admitted that its aural manifestation is almost inevitably rather more of a problem when listening to a recording than when attending a live performance; as it happens, the only question that I still have about that factor is the extent to which that conflict between the two duos can make its presence felt even in a live performance if, for example, one keeps one's eyes shut throughout (as I have done, just to test this out, more than once) - this is a similar problem, I think, to that of Thea Musgrave's Clarinet Concerto of 40 years ago and Colin Matthews's Horn Concerto of a few years back (both very fine works, I think), where perambulation of players forms part of the interactive relationships explored in those works (respectively the clarinet soloist walking around creating and joining small concertante groups and the interactions between the solo horn and a group of orchestral horns). Where I part company with Carter's Third Quartet (or, more properly, don't even get to engage with it in the first place) is that (a) I just cannot bring myself to get any real kind of grip on much of its harmonic language (which is itself a disorienting experience as it is simply not the case with so much other Carter from before and after it) and (b) I never get any sense of the work progressing logicallyand inevitably from event to event or series of events to more series of events in the way that I also do in just about every other Carter work I have heard; even in the Piano Concerto, with which I admit to having had so much trouble until recently, I didn't feel that I experienced either of those kinds of difficulty - in fact, now that I have heard it played brilliantly, I perceive one of my biggest problems with it to have centred around the treatment of the piano itself which, in Hodges' hands, is a problem that simply dissolves completely, so thoroughly convincing is his handling of the solo part. Matters of performance can, therefore, make a great deal of difference to one's responses and I think that I really must just give the Pacifica a try with the Third Quartet (anyone here heard this yet?; in the meantime, I can tell you that, by comparison, even listening to the Ardittis playing the Fifth Quartet is almost like hearing a quartet playing Mozart! My firm favourite of the five, however, is and has always been the First.

Best,

Alistair