Carter, E: Cello Sonata

This disc contains a number of major, though seldom performed, works for cello and piano. It commemorates the centenaries of Martinu and Carter and also includes works by Messiaen and the young British composer Joe Cutler.

For this album of music by Elliott Carter, cellist Johannes Martens has assembled some of Norway’s foremost young musicians. Tracing Carter’s development through some of his most creative period, these works span over 50 years of composition, from the beautiful Elegy and the celebrated Cello Sonata through to newer pieces for solo instruments, duo, trio and string quartet, they show the mark of a supremely experienced craftsman.

Composer Elliott Carter can truly claim the title of living legend. The two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning composer, mentored as a youth by Charles Ives, is not only being honoured in the United States and Europe with centenary concerts of his work, but he has actually been able to make brief but triumphal appearances at some of these celebrations. The New York Times reported that, during a five-day Carter festival in July at Tanglewood, organized by conductor and longtime Carter champion James Levine, audiences were ‘shouting as if they were at a rock concert when Mr. Carter took his curtain calls’ - a particularly impressive response given that Carter has long been considered a purveyor of “difficult music”. The centenary events culminated on December 11 at Carnegie Hall, on the evening of Carter’s 100th birthday, with a premiere of a new piece, to be performed by the Boston Symphony.

This four-disc retrospective documents some of Carter’s most essential works, recorded for Nonesuch between 1968 and 1985. As liner note writer Paul Griffiths explains, Nonesuch, then helmed by creative director Teresa Sterne, ‘played a conspicuous role in carrying his music to a wide audience… bringing him the acclaim that encouraged him to go on, with undiminished vigor, into a ‘late period’ that has lasted more than thirty years. Nonesuch was not only the first label to give Carter’s music international distribution and continuing support, it also placed his work in an appropriate context of discovery and adventure.’

Carter, who the New Yorker’s Alex Ross has called ‘a giant of American Modernism’, has said he considered ‘change, process, evolution as music’s prime factor.’ Time was a constant obsession; he experimented boldly with tempo and often looked beyond traditional Western sources for inspiration. This compilation includes convention-defying, breakthrough pieces like Carter’s Cello Sonata and String Quartet No. 1, ‘a large experiment in polyrhythms of all kinds’, Carter has said, which he wrote while spending a soul searching year in Arizona’s Sonora Desert. Carter demanded as much from the intrepid listeners who embraced his rhythmically and theoretically complex work as from the musicians who played it. He was often a polarizing figure, who provoked and confounded as many as he influenced and encouraged. But, as the Los Angeles Times recently noted, there was always something deeper to be found below the daunting, analytical surface: ‘Carter's music is mathematically impressive. He works with massive numbers of sketches and charts and graphs. But …the core of the music is dramatic. Each piece has a poetic soul.’

‘One of America's most distinguished creative artists in any field.’ Aaron Copland

‘As we salute Carter, we are hailing a composer who has always been his own man, and whose music is some of the most remarkable and enduring of our time.’ Guardian