Elliott Carter: Horn Concerto premiered in Boston
(December 2007)
With premieres continuing into his 100th year, there has been no relaxing of Elliott Carter’s compositional activity, but as the Boston Globe noted, “more impressive than the composer's productivity has been the vitality of the music he has been writing. The new Horn Concerto is no exception.” The first performance took place on 15 November with the Boston Symphony and its principal horn James Sommerville, conducted by James Levine.
Sommerville crosses the Atalantic in January to give the Dutch premiere at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam with the Radio Kamer Filharmonie conducted by Peter Eötvös, and further European performances are scheduled for Settembre Musica in Turin and Milan and by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and Sakari Oramo on Carter’s birthday itself.
“Carter gives the soloist a workout in some rapid figurations, but the dominant character of this piece is surprisingly lyrical… He uses the horn's long solo lines as opportunities for vivid experiments in timbre, as if challenging the soloist to see how many masks he can don in quick succession. Sommerville rose gamely to the challenge, navigating the passagework with apparent ease and demonstrating a wide kaleidoscope of tone, by turns powerfully focused, darkly veiled, raspy and aggressive, and brightly gleaming. The composer was on hand to take two bows, smiling widely, and then surely repairing off to write more music.”
Boston Globe
“It is a thoroughly agreeable piece - lucid in its mix of sonorities, rhythmically vital, brilliant in exploiting the horn's resources and outgoing in a way that befits a concerto. Its single movement comprises seven brief sections, each pitting the horn, which plays virtually non-stop, against a different orchestral grouping. A legato line is heard against muted brass, florid passages vie with a battery of percussion. The 11-minute piece should have a bright future...”
Financial Times
What Next? on stage
Carter’s What Next? was staged in Munich in November in a double bill with Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi - a preferred pairing by the composer. The opera was also staged at the Miller Theater in New York in December and a new production is planned by the Neue Oper in Vienna next November.
> Further information on Work: Horn Concerto
Photo: © Copyright Meredith Heuer
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