Elliott Carter: A Nonesuch Retrospective
(Nonesuch, four CDs) £24.45
Carter: String Quartets Nos 2,3 & 4
Pacifica Quartet
(Naxos) £5.86
Carter: Dialogues; Mosaic; etc
New Music Concerts
Ensemble/Aitken
(Naxos, CD & DVD) £8.80
It was in the 1970s that the importance of Elliott Carter's music began to be recognised, on this side of the Atlantic at least. In his native US his achievement took much longer to be appreciated fully, if it ever has, but ironically it was largely through a series of LPs made in New York from 1968 onwards for the pioneering Nonesuch label that many of Carter's works came into wider circulation in Britain. Though Nonesuch later transferred many of those performances to CD they were never easily available here, so this collection, released on four discs to celebrate Carter's 100th birthday last December, is a must for all Carter admirers.
Only one important recording from that era seems to have been omitted. Carter's coruscating Duo for violin and piano, one of his most challenging works, which originally appeared paired with the Double Concerto (which is included) is nowhere to be found. Otherwise there is a whole clutch of outstanding performances, going chronologically from Carter's 1946 Piano Sonata, played wonderfully by Paul Jacobs, to the 1982 Triple Duo, commissioned for Peter Maxwell Davies's performing group The Fires of London, and including the 1947 ballet The Minotaur, the sonatas for cello and for flute, oboe, cello and harpsichord, the first two string quartets, the piano piece Night Fantasies (another terrific Jacobs performance) and the Robert Lowell song cycle In Sleep, in Thunder. There's also a "guest" account of the Variations for orchestra, conducted by James Levine, which originally appeared on Deutsche Grammophon. Just why that has been included is unclear, though it's welcome nevertheless.
The performances of the first two string quartets by the Composers Quartet in the Nonesuch set make fascinating comparisons with those of the Pacifica Quartet, who have now completed their Carter cycle for Naxos. As their recital of all five quartets at the Wigmore Hall a couple of weeks ago demonstrated, the Pacifica have absorbed this music totally, and play it with a natural authority that no group before has ever matched. The Composers Quartet are hugely accomplished on their own terms, and although alongside these new accounts they do sometimes seem slightly tentative, their account of the First Quartet has an epic sweep that just eludes the Pacifica in their performance that came out last year.
Naxos's second Carter birthday offering concentrates on the later works, only two of which are at all substantial: Dialogues for piano and ensemble, composed for the London Sinfonietta in 2004, and Mosaic for harp and ensemble, written for the Nash Ensemble the following year. They are both typically deft, slightly prickly pieces - Dialogues, in particular, has a musical density that is disguised by its modest dimensions - and the rest of the disc is taken up with a series of the instrumental miniatures Carter has produced over the last two decades, often as birthday offerings for friends and fellow composers. The Canadian performances are all highly accomplished, and the release also includes a DVD containing a filmed interview with Carter, as well as concert performances of Mosaic and Dialogues.