Twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize,
first composer to receive the United States National
Medal of Arts, one of the few composers ever awarded
Germany's Ernst Von Siemens Music Prize, and in 1988
made "Commandeur dans l'Ordre des Arts et des
Lettres" by the Government of France, Elliott
Carter is internationally recognized as one of the
leading American voices of the classical music tradition.
He recently received the Prince Pierre Foundation
Music Award, bestowed by the Principality of Monaco,
and was one of a handful of living composers elected
to the Classical Music Hall of Fame.
December 11, 1998 marked Carter’s 90th birthday,
crowning a year of celebrations by performing organizations
around the world. Several prominent festivals marked
the occasion, including Tanglewood, the Santa Fe Chamber
Music Festival, the Pontino Festival in Italy, and
the Huddersfield Festival [U.K.]. Concerts devoted
to his music took place in Amsterdam, Brussels, Cologne,
London, Montreal, New York, Toronto, and Zurich. Writers
from eight countries interviewed the composer, and
on the birthday itself, Columbia University’s
radio station broadcast 23 hours of his music.
First encouraged toward a musical career by his friend
and mentor Charles Ives, Carter was recognized by
the Pulitzer Prize Committee for the first time in
1960 for his groundbreaking compositions for the string
quartet medium, and was soon thereafter hailed by
Stravinsky for his Double Concerto for harpsichord,
piano and two chamber orchestras (1961) and Piano
Concerto (1967), both of which Stravinsky dubbed
"masterpieces". While he spent much of the
1960s working on just two works, the Piano Concerto
and Concerto for Orchestra (1969), the breakthroughs
he achieved in those pieces led to an artistic resurgence
that gathered momentum in the decades that followed.
Indeed, one of the extraordinary features of Carter’s
career is his astonishing productivity and creative
vitality as he enters his tenth decade. Critics agree
that his recent scores are among the most attractive,
deeply-felt and compelling works he has ever written.
His later orchestral essays include Oboe Concerto
(1986-87), Three Occasions (completed 1989)
and his enormously successful Violin Concerto
(1990), which has been performed in more than a dozen
countries. A recording of the latter work on Virgin
Classics, featuring Oliver Knussen conducting the
London Sinfonietta with soloist Ole Böhn, won
Carter a Grammy for Best Contemporary Composition
of 1994. New recordings of Carter’s music appear
continually, making him one of the most frequently
recorded contemporary composers.
Carter’s crowning achievement as an orchestral
composer may be his 50-minute triptych Symphonia:
sum fluxae pretium spei [ "I am the prize
of flowing hope"], which received its first integral
performance on April 25, 1998 with Oliver Knussen
conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra as part of the
ISCM World Music Days in Manchester. A recording of
Symphonia by Knussen and the BBCSO has recently been
released on Deutsche Grammophon. It is paired with
Carter’s lively and playful Clarinet Concerto
(1996), which has traveled widely in performances
by the Ensemble InterContemporain, Orpheus, London
Sinfonietta, Ensemble Modern, and several other distinguished
ensembles. His newest orchestral works are Cello
Concerto (2001), premiered by Yo-Yo Ma with the
Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Daniel Barenboim,
and Boston Concerto, making its debut in April 2003
with Ingo Metzmacher conducting the Boston Symphony
Orchestra.
One of the most exciting musical events of 1999 was
the debut of Carter’s first opera, What Next?,
commissioned and premiered by the Staatsoper Unter
den Linden in Berlin under Daniel Barenboim. The 45-minute
opera, to a libretto by Paul Griffiths, comments wryly
on the human condition as its six characters, unhurt
but confused, confront the aftermath of a auto accident.
What Next? has been hailed by critics from around
the world for its wit, assured vocal writing, and
refined orchestration. Its American premiere took
place in a concert performance with the Chicago Symphony
in February 2000.
Carter continues to show his mastery in smaller forms
as well. Along with a large number of brief solo and
chamber works, his later years have brought major
essays such as Triple Duo (1983), Quintet
(piano and winds, 1991), and String Quartet No.5
(1995), composed for the Arditti Quartet. Another
dedicated advocate of Carter’s music, Ursula
Oppens, joined forces with the Arditti Quartet to
give the premiere of Quintet for Piano and String
Quartet in November 1998 at the Library of Congress’s
Coolidge Auditorium in Washington, followed by tour
performances throughout Europe and the U.S. Recent
works include Asko Concerto, written for Holland’s
ASKO ensemble, and Tempo e Tempi, a song cycle
on Italian texts for soprano, oboe, clarinet, violin,
and cello, both receiving their premieres in Spring
2000.
A native of New York City, Carter has been compared
as an artist to another New Yorker, Henry James, with
whom he is seen to share multifaceted richness of
vision and fastidiousness of craft based on intimate
familiarity with Western (and in Carter's case, non-Western)
artistic traditions. Like Henry James, Carter and
his work reflect the impress of a lasting and deeply
felt relationship with Europe, a relationship dating
from adolescent travels with his father, nourished
by study of the fruits of European artistic and intellectual
culture, and cemented by a 3-year course of musical
training in Paris with Nadia Boulanger during the
period 1932-1935. Enriched through wide acquaintance
with European artists, including many, such as Bartók
and Stravinsky, who came to America during World War
II, Carter has seen his work as widely appreciated
and as actively encouraged overseas as in his own
country. In 1987 the Paul Sacher Foundation moved
to acquire all Carter's musical manuscripts, to be
permanently maintained in a public archive in Basel
alongside similarly comprehensive deposits of the
manuscripts of Stravinsky, Boulez, Bartók,
Hindemith, Strauss and other universally acknowledged
20th-century masters. 
 |
