Elliott Carter String Quartets On Naxos
The year 2008 marked the 100th birthday of the great American composer Elliott Carter ( 1908 -- 2012). To celebrate the occasion, Naxos released two CDs consisting of Carter's five string quartets, the first and the fifth of which are included on this disk. The Pacifica Quartet, a group of young musicians from California, perform these difficult works with passion and clarity. The Pacifica Quartet specializes in contemporary music, especially the works of Elliott Carter.
Carter began the serious study of music as an adolescent and his efforts were encouraged by Charles Ives. In the 1940s, some of his music (including his first symphony available on Naxos in a recording by Kenneth Schermerhorn) is reminiscent of the Americana music of Aaron Copland, but Carter soon developed his own unmistakably modernist musical voice. (The Schermerhorn CD also includes the difficult Carter piano concerto.) The five string quartets, written over a period of 45 years give an outstanding overview of this modernist American composer.
Although Carter's quartets bristle with difficulties for the performer and listener, I was struck by the accessibility and the visceral, emotional character of these quartets when I first listened through them. There is a tendency to over-intellectualize modern music and Carter's music in particular. But this is music which, when given the chance, speaks to the heart first, before it speaks to the mind, and which mirrors the complexity of both specifically modern experience and of the human condition.
Carter's first string quartet, composed in 1950-51, was among his first modernist efforts. It is a lengthy, difficult work in five movement which are played without a break between them. The work is densely scored, with bristling harmonies and marked shifts in tempos and rhythm. The texture of the work also is full of shifts, from passages for solo instruments, to sections for impassioned ensemble playing, to moments when the quartet breaks into two groups (the cello and the viola playing against the two violins in the fourth movement), and to long pizzicato passages. Yet the work makes a cohesive, unified whole. I was fascinated by the transitions between movements in this work, and in the fifth quartet, as musical passages of widely different characters flow seamlessly together. Thus the work opens with a lengthy, emotional solo for cello which, after elaboration by the other instruments, shifts imperceptibly into the following scherzo. The adagio consists, as I mentioned, of a section for cello and viola juxtaposed against a figure for the two violins, and these two competing voices are ultimately unified into a taut section which becomes the basis for the long variation movement which concludes the work. The variations work up to a climax (and the thematic material remains identifiable throughout) and then the bubble bursts as Carter closes the work with a solo for the violin, quiet and high in the instrument's register.
The fifth quartet, composed in 1995, has a lighter texture. It consists of 12 short movements played without pause and lasts only about 21 minutes. In this work, short sections of a distinct musical character are juxtaposed against an opening introduction and against sections marked "interlude". There are two slow movements, the fourth and the tenth, three scherzo-like movements, the second, sixth, and eighth, and a concluding pizzicato movement, with some odd sounds from the instruments, marked capriccioso. The fascination of the work lies in the interrelationship of these sections with the interludes, as Carter joins the movements together by weaving moments from the surrounding short pieces into the interludes -- which have a deceptively sketchy style. Thus, interlude II, takes up the slow, expressive character of the preceding Lento, but turns at the last moment to transition to the following presto. Interlude V, in contrast, only makes a gesture towards the previous adagio before it sets the stage for the final Capriccioso. I listened several times to this work straight through and, on my last hearing, watched the second timer on my CD so that I could see directly how the movements flowed together.
Carter's music will not appeal to those listeners with exclusively conservative musical tastes. But listeners with a background in classical music who wish to be adventurous will respond to the music of Elliott Carter. Naxos is doing a great service in making Carter's music available to a wide audience at a budget price.
Robin Friedman
