Carter in London: Boston Concerto at BBC Proms
(July 2003)
American music’s elder statesman, Elliott Carter - who celebrates his 95th birthday in December - travels to London in August for the European premiere of his recent orchestral work, Boston Concerto, at the BBC Proms.
Oliver Knussen, one of the foremost interpreters of Carter’s music, conducts the first European performance of Boston Concerto with the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall on 14 August. The BBC SO has enjoyed a special relationship with Carter’s music, giving the first complete performance of his orchestral magnum opus Symphonia under Knussen in 1998 and recording the work for Deutsche Grammophon, a disc which won Gramophone’s Contemporary Recording of the Year award in 2000 (DG 459 660-2GH).
Boston Concerto was commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra and premiered by them under conductor Ingo Metzmacher on 3 April. The work was written as a "thank you" to the orchestra whose concerts Carter first attended in the 1920s. The composer describes how the new score "throws a spotlight on each of the remarkable sections of the orchestra, surrounding them with short orchestral pizzicati sections for the entire group, not unlike the plan of a concerto grosso".
Boston Concerto is dedicated to Carter’s wife Helen, who sadly died a month after the work’s premiere: the opening of a William Carlos Williams poem heads the score, describing how "As the rain falls so does your love bathe every open Object of the world". This imagery suggested the particular pointillist soundworld that Carter introduces into the work’s refrain sections, "not unlike certain kinds of rain, or wind rustling through the trees".
"The 15-minute work alternates a constantly shifting refrain that sounds like the translucent patter of rain with slower, lyrical sections focussed on varied landscapes represented by the sonorities of different sections of the orchestra... There is something natural and nurturing about the piece and its internal relationships, and the whole thing sounds both precise and spontaneous; it is bathed in light."
Boston Globe
Future performances of Boston Concerto include Ingo Metzmacher conducting the Dutch premiere with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam on 9 October. The Scottish premiere follows on 22 November at the Tramway in Glasgow, with Ilan Volkov conducting the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra.
In anticipation of the Boston Concerto performance in London, the Proms Carter feature also includes the composer’s Clarinet Concerto on 8 August with Michael Collins as soloist and the London Sinfonietta conducted by Peter Eötvös. Collins’s performance of the concerto was coupled with Symphonia on the Gramophone Award-winning disc. Alongside Collins, leading interpreters of the virtuosic solo part include Alain Damiens, who was soloist in the work’s Paris premiere in 1997, Roland Diry, JohnBruce Yeh, Charles Neidich, Simon Aldrich and Ernesto Molinari.
Pacifica plays five Carter string quartets at Edinburgh Festival
One of the contemporary music highlights of this year’s Edinburgh International Festival is a marathon cycle on 26 August of Carter’s five string quartets, performed by the Pacifica Quartet, one of the USA's most dynamic chamber groups to emerge in the past decade. Acclaimed cycles have already been given by the Pacifica in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, with further performances planned in the USA during the coming season. Carter’s string quartets are one of the most important contributions to the medium in the past half-century, spanning the composer’s musical development from 1950 to 1995.
> Further information on Work: Boston Concerto
Carter Photo: © Meredith Heuer
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