Elliott Carter

Contemporary Music

Going Beyond the Impossible to the Musical: The JACK Quartet play the Complete String Quartets of Elliott Carter.

The string quartet literature is notable for throwing super-complex challenges at the players; after all, this is the most cohesive medium for ensemble playing, and quartets play together for years or decades and can polish their communication and coordination skills to the highest degree. For that reason, composers have striven their utmost to present path-breaking difficulties and daring quartets to conquer them. One sub-history of 20th/21st century music has been the interplay between quartet composers and the groups performing their music. The avatar of all of this is late Beethoven, whose Große Fuge pushed the boundaries of playability in its day, and whose late quartets were composed with the skills of the Schuppanzigh Quartet in mind. 

Music

Proms 2011 – a personal preview by Gabriel Kellett: Royal Albert Hall et alibi, 15 July – 10 September, 2011

I'm in two minds about the Proms tradition of always allotting significant programming space to composers with major anniversaries. It's transparently a fairly arbitrary device to make the programmers' jobs much easier and minimise the thorny problem of personal taste entering the decision-making process; on the other hand, without it we would never get three concerts this year featuring one of my favourites, Percy Grainger (died 50 years ago). In particular, the late night Prom on 2 August including Kathryn Tickell and June Tabor, celebrating the folk music Grainger was inspired by, is to me one of the most interesting this year.
Recordings

Now available: “Celebrating Carter’s Century,” music by Elliott Carter from the 2008 Festival of Contemporary Music at Tanglewood

An especially exciting bit of news was tucked away in the middle of the release: the BSO’s own recording label, will release as a download Celebrating Carter’s Century, music by Elliott Carter from the 2008 Festival of Contemporary Music at Tanglewood. We can only hope that the documentation of this great event will be as complete as possible.
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