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100 Years -  Elliott Carter and Olivier Messiaen: Da Capo Chamber Players, Merkin Concert Hall, New York City, 15. 1.2009 (BH)

Elliott Carter: Esprit rude/Esprit doux (1985)
Elliott Carter: Enchanted Preludes (1988)
Elliott Carter: Poems of Louis Zukofsky (2008, second performance)
Pierre Boulez: Sonatine (1946)
Elliott Carter: Tempo e Tempi (1998-1999)
Olivier Messiaen: Quatuor pour la fin du temps (1940)

Da Capo Chamber Players
Curtis Macomber, violin
André Emelianoff, cello
Patricia Spencer, flute
Meighan Stoops, clarinet
Blair McMillen, piano

Guest artists:
Lucy Shelton, soprano
Robert Ingliss, oboe


With a rich history of performing works by Elliott Carter, it was only natural that the Da Capo Chamber Players would design one of the most intense tributes of the season to mark his centenary.  Happily, the year also marked the 100th birthday of Olivier Messiaen, whose Quatuor pour la fin du temps has also been one of Da Capo's specialties. 

Carter's Esprit rude/Esprit doux was written for Pierre Boulez and is frolic personified—a water sprite chasing itself—for flute and clarinet.  Here the indomitable Patricia Spencer and Meighan Stoops were completely inside its burbling fusion of "rough" and "smooth" breathing.  Ms. Spencer then teamed up with cellist André Emelianoff for a lively performance of Enchanted Preludes, for which they gave the premiere in 1988, some twenty years ago.  Like many of Carter's works, this one revels in contrasts: when the flute remains calm, the cello decides to up the anxiety, and vice versa. 

In December, Soprano Lucy Shelton gave the world premiere of Carter's Poems of Louis Zukofsky, four short settings by the father of violinist Paul Zukofsky for voice and clarinet.   It was a treat to hear them again so soon after the premiere, and with Ms. Stoops adding her fluidity to the fluctuating lines.  Pianist Blair McMillen joined Ms. Spencer for Pierre Boulez's Sonatine, astonishingly written the same year as the composer's first Piano Sonata, when he was a mere 21 years old.  Spencer and McMillen seemed admirably cool with its fearsome technical challenges, allowing the audience to focus on the magical interplay between the two of them. 

To end the first half, Ms. Shelton returned for Carter's Tempo e Tempi, a song cycle whose meaning and impact only deepen with each encounter.  Using poems by Eugenio Montale, Salvatore Quasimodo and Giuseppe Ungaretti, the composer reflects on the fleeting nature of time, helped by some of his most transparent writing.  Robert Ingliss joined the group to illuminate the lyrical yet daunting oboe part, with the new music veteran Curtis Macomber joining in on violin.

The entire second half was devoted to Messiaen's stark Quatuor pour la fin du temps, written when the composer was imprisoned in the early 1940s.  The four musicians here could not have been more memorable, with Macomber and Emelianoff eerily precise in some haunting unisons, and ending with McMillan intoning sad, rapturous chords from the piano.  I found Ms. Stoops so emotionally naked—her solo during "The Abyss of the Birds" was stunning—that it was hard to believe when afterward, she confided that she had never performed the piece before.

As a slightly sad footnote, the evening occurred on one of the coldest winter nights of the month—so icy that the birthday honoree was unable to attend, due to unavoidable concerns for a 100-year-old body.  I hope he receives a recording of the evening, since I know he would have been very moved.

Bruce Hodges

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