Elliott Carter New Music Concerts Isabel Bader Theatre in Toronto on Friday
The American composer Elliott Carter wrote all the pieces on this program when he was near or past his hundredth birthday (he's now 102). That has to be some kind of record, and certainly made the show a unique event in the history of contemporary music in Canada.
Carter is a revered and polarizing figure. His fiercest devotees have always been distinguished musicians, one of whom - the pianist and writer Charles Rosen - likes to say that Mahler and even Mozart might have been forgotten if musicians hadn't insisted on playing their works. It seems safe to say that the most intense pleasures of Carter's music are reserved for those who play or study his scores.
The music performed by New Music Concerts, none of it heard in Canada before, included a set of songs, a wind quintet, two other works for one or two players, and a pair of concertos for flute and bass clarinet. All conveyed a remarkably high level of focus, intensity and craft.
I'm saying that largely because of the focus, intensity and craft shown by the players. The music itself was hard to parse on one hearing. I often felt that knotty problems were being solved, but the evidence usually zipped past too quickly or elaborately for me to see problem or solution clearly. It also seemed that Carter's recent work has two main modes: one skittish and percussive, with spiky staccato accents flung in all directions; the other slow and somnolent, as if he were testing the degree to which melody can survive as a string of long notes with hardly any rhythmic interest.
All the pieces had abundant drama and contrast, and showed a real explorer's interest in getting maximum variety from a handful of instruments. The expanded armoury of the wind quintet Nine By Five showed Carter's flair for high colour and grotesquerie, the latter most evidently in the Varèse-like blast of the opening and the sportive capering close, led by Max Christie playing a manic E-flat clarinet.
For me, the most arresting moment in the Flute Concerto came when soloist Robert Aitken struck up a duet in close register with ensemble flutist Douglas Stewart. It was as if the solo instrument had accidentally spotted itself in a mirror, and was turning this way and that to be really sure of its identity. The Concertino for bass clarinet (performed by Virgil Blackwell with an ensemble of 17) conjured a magical passage of deeply resonant sound that was much more than the sum of its parts.
The jagged counterpoints of Tre Duetti (performed by violinist Fujiko Imajishi and cellist David Hetherington) often seemed like a dance at the edge of a precipice. The nimble, short Figment V was reasonably fun to hear (twice, from Rick Sacks on marimba); the Poems of Louis Zukofsky less so, partly because in spite of mezzo-soprano Patricia Green's elegant performance, I could seldom make out the words. Several of these pieces were marred by instrumental noises off, in a hall that really isn't fit for music.
Friday's show was recorded for later broadcast on CBC Radio 2's The Signal.