GET CARTER! The Music of Elliot Carter (III): Jane Irwin (soprano), BBC Symphony Orchestra, David Robertson (conductor), Barbican Centre, London, 14.01.2006 (AO)

 

Stereotyping composers by their racial origins is as delimiting as it would be for anyone else.  Carter spoke French as a child, and Paris was his spiritual home.  It was the vibrant centre of modernism after 1933.   Throughout this weekend, Carter’s European roots have been ubiquitous, with pieces by Stravinsky, Debussy, Bartok and Schoenberg.   This concert examines Carter’s American cultural father, Charles Ives.  For whatever reason, Ives distrusted European modernism. Carter’s training with Nadia Boulanger filled him with new ideas, leading him to put down Ives Concord Sonata, causing a break between them.  The unanswerable question hangs: what might Carter have become had he avoided Europe?  He certainly had no problems writing in a full blooded “American” genre as the Holiday Overture shows. It’s more Copland than Copland’s self-consciously Schoenbergian Connotations, written in 1961, by which time Carter had long gone his own way.

Exuberant and extravert as Holiday Overture may be, it actually owes its existence to France.  The “holiday” referred to was the liberation of Paris in 1944.  For Carter and his exiled European friends it was a more deeply felt, personal celebration than any platitude.  For all its overt narrative of a patriotic event, Ives’ Decoration Day, isn’t quite as straightforward as it may seem.  Quite specifically it links to Ives’ personal memories of his father, whom he thought had been a Civil War hero.  The wider Ives family was obsessed with material success, while Ives’ father was a misfit, a musician who never made money.  Ives loved his father and picked up on underlying family tensions. Robertson went for subtlety, making the swirling, dream like textures evoke more enigmatic, suppressed feelings.  Even the references to municipal bands aren’t quite what they seem, for Ives’ father was a local bandsman. The trumpet playing taps in the distance was uncommonly moving: perhaps that’s why Ives suddenly switched back to a wild parody of  marching band music, as if he’s drawing back from something too painful to face.  It’s more disturbing and deeper than meets the eye, and Robertson understood. Ives’ seems to presage much of what Carter would later explore. His Fourth Symphony, for example, brims with multiple directions, polyrhythms and ideas about time and memory.

Carter’s Of Rewaking was written in 2002.  Orchestral textures are pared down, reduced to sudden staccato commentaries behind the vocal line.  In the third song, Shadows, the orchestra is minimal, activity concentrated in long drawn vocal arcs.  The words reflect Carter’s usual interests, “….the instant/ trivial as it is/ is all that we have/ unless/ things the imagination feeds upon……startle us anew”, but he seems to be following the poet’s idiosyncratic punctuation.  He’s not word painting, but responding to shapes and silences.  I wasn’t impressed with Jane Irwin’s mannered, un-nuanced singing, but perhaps that was Carter’s intention, to treat the voice as a frame on which the silences and hesitations resonate all the more.  It’s very Zen.

Carter specifically thanked the BBC for including Roger Sessions’ Rhapsody for Orchestra in the programme.  This is a large, dramatic work, densely scored, and enlivened by fanfares and vivid crescendos, well suited to Robertson’s energetic style.  Sessions and Carter were together in Rome in the mid 1950’s when Carter started his Variations for Orchestra.  In roughly half an hour, the music goes through numerous phases, nine variations on a theme and a complex Finale.  The music accelerates and slows down in endless variation, rising columns of sound reaching ever higher.  It turns on sudden pivot points, such as after sharp flashes of brass, or an intervention by the harp. It surges forward with such energy that you hardly notice the passing of time in the real world.  After a big crescendo with drums full blast, the music suddenly diminishes like a falling leaf, fluttering downwards.  Significantly though, it doesn’t seem to actually reach base level but hangs, as if suspended in mid air.

 

Anne Ozorio