Boosey & Hawkes

Elliott Carter: reviews of On Conversing with Paradise

(September 2009)

“Although 100, the composer’s On Conversing with Paradise is among the most hard-hitting scores he’s ever produced.” So wrote the Sunday Times of Elliott Carter’s new song-cycle for baritone and ensemble, on poetry by Ezra Pound, premiered at the Aldeburgh Festival on 20 June.

The composer travelled to the UK for the Carter feature, including an entertaining public conversation with Festival Director Pierre-Laurent Aimard, as well as the premiere by the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group conducted by Oliver Knussen.

“The text is taken from two of Pound’s Cantos and deals with the impossibility of producing the perfect poem (the paradise of the title). Much of it was written while Pound was interned in Italy after the second world war, and Carter seems to reflect this in his setting, with the five percussionists creating an aural barrier around the baritone’s lines, as if confining their freedom. The text is elusive, but its setting is lyrical, sharpening the contrast with the fierce ensemble contributions.”
The Guardian

““Why should not old men be mad?”, wrote Yeats, and On Conversing with Paradise seems to give expression at once to the luminous rantings of Yeats’s mentor, Pound, and to Carter’s own putative rage against mortality and folly. We can imagine ourselves with Pound in his cage. The percussive furore running through the work, and the baritone’s nearly incessant hectoring, make for a disturbing rendition of Pound’s predicament.”
Sunday Times

“The human voice here gives a new impassioned subjectivity to the music’s expression. Leigh Melrose’s admirably clear enunciation of Carter’s strong, syllabic word-setting sang out its ardently paced arioso in an environment of pungent pitched percussion, long, reverberant bow strokes and sustained string harmonics… “Learn of the green world what can be thy place.” Carter, it seems, has found his.”
The Times

“…you begin to wonder whether Carter has composed his own credo.”
Daily Telegraph

Following Tanglewood’s centenary celebration of his music last year, Carter returned to the festival in August for the first complete performance of the Poems of Louis Zukofsky for clarinet and soprano, co-commissioned by the Jerusalem International Music Festival and the Nash Ensemble. Carter is currently completing What are years, a song-cycle on poems by Marianne Moore, a contemporary of Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams who corresponded with Ezra Pound during his incarceration. Scored for soprano and ensemble, the work is to be premiered at a collection of summer festivals next year.

> Further information on Work: On Conversing with Paradise

Photo: Jeff Herman

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