Sospeso presents celebrates the 95th birthday of the legendary American composer on Friday, January 30, 2004. Sospeso and guest artists the Arditti Quartet will celebrate as well the release of Mode Records' high-resolution Carter CD/DVD Quintets and Voices, featuring Sospeso, the Ardittis, and Ursula Oppens. Four of Mr. Carter's recent works (including the Italian song cycle Tempo e Tempi, sung by soprano Lucy Shelton) mingle with newly written tribute works by an international group of leading composers, including Pierre Boulez, Elliott Sharp, and Christian Wolff. 

Twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the 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.

First encouraged toward a musical career by his friend and mentor Charles Ives, Mr. 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 1960’s 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 Mr. 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.

Mr. Carter’s major orchestral essays of the past decade include 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 Mr. Carter a Grammy for Best Contemporary Composition of 1994. New recordings of Mr. Carter’s music appear continually, making him one of the most frequently recorded contemporary composers.