N. Carter

Opening with a fleshy, resonant version of "90+," which was nominated for a 1998 Grammy award, this Carter collection is special not only for Charles Rosen's execution but also for the CD-closing conversation between performer and composer. Rosen opens the chat with a demonstration of how harmonic dissonance at once backlights and highlights Carter's famed rhythmic explorations. And Carter tells him, "This is the way we experience many things, the idea that one thing comments on another constantly." That's how Carter's music is, also constantly: frontal harmonic shocks, whether ringing tremulously or jumping in bursts of flash–as in Rosen's read of the Piano Sonata–are in dialogue with silence, rhythmic twists, and plainly beautiful constructions that sound in-process.
On 2008 came out: Oppens Plays Carter, Cedille CDR 90000 108, with piano pieces composed after 1997 (Two Diversions; Retrouvailles; Two Thoughts About the Piano; Matribute): Elliott Carter isn't the easiest composer to love, but he's an important one.

Following up his 2000 tribute to guitarist Django Reinhardt, Chasin' the Gypsy, saxophonist James Carter pays homage to iconic jazz singer Billie Holiday on Gardenias for Lady Day. Perhaps never before has the jazz iconoclast balanced so perfectly his "big top" avant-garde leanings with his more pinstriped traditionalist aesthetic. This is a beautiful album that revels as much in classic melody as it does in Carter's most torrid saxophone "skronk." Although the album largely succeeds on Carter's virtuosic performance, it gains most of its character from the deft and unpredictable orchestral arrangements of Greg Cohen and fellow Detroiter Cassius Richmond. In particular, Richmond brings a cinematic quality to the album with his treatments of "Sunset," "I Wonder Where Our Love Is Gone," and "Gloria" that breathe and swell, rubbing dramatically against Carter's muscular sound…

For Elliott Carter, a musical instrument is always an extension of a performer. His writing grows from a detailed understanding of the mechanical and acoustical properties of each instrument, but also out of the way a player breathes and moves. The remarkable performances heard on this recording respond to Carter's imaginative challenges. They make us acutely aware of the sounds of each instrument, the stress of bow against string, breath against reed, and they take these physical facts into the realm of human gesture and emotion. Each work combines these physical and psychological elements in an ever-changing polyphony which often suggests an argument, sometimes between many parties, at other times an internal dialogue. As in real human arguments, the outcome is hard to predict and is rarely conclusive. Many people argue, even with themselves, more through assertion than reason, more through blind opposition than through open dialogue. (As the writer Fran Liebowitz once put it "the opposite of listening is waiting.") It is precisely the cantankerous, messy and explosive aspects of argument that Carter has evoked in his musical polyphony. The pieces on this album illustrate the fertility of this theme for Carter's imagination over the last forty-five years.

from the attached booklet

Elliott Carter was something of a 'late starter' as a composer, but he has made up for that with an almost unprecedented fecundity of creative activ ity and accomplishment in advanced old age. The programme on this disc contrasts a comparatively 'early' orchestral work, from his mid-thirties, with the highly mature Violin Concerto written in his eighty-second year and a solo violin cycle most of which was composed in his nineties. At the time of writing this note (July 2005) Carter is not far short of his own centenary, and continuing to produce highly complex, sophisticated scores with an energy that would hardly be conceivable even in a much younger man.

from the attached booklet