Fran Liebowitz

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