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Carter: Syringa; Tempo e Tempi; Piano Quintet etc, Shelton/Solomon-Glover/ Ensemble Sospeso/Milarsky/Asbury/ Oppens/Arditti Quartet by
Andrew Clements If discs of Elliott Carter's music are no longer the novelty they were even a decade ago, there is still plenty of scope for new ones. The Mode collection is the first recording of the 1997 Quintet for Piano and trings, typically muscular and argumentative - but it also includes outstanding performances of two major vocal works, one of which, Syringa, ranks alongside Carter's greatest achievements. Between 1947 and 1975, Carter composed no vocal music at all. His painstakingly slow progress in the 1950s and 60s towards a musical language all his own had been worked out purely in instrumental and orchestral works. But since the creative dam was breached, he has gone on to produce a succession of song cycles, all informed by contemporary American literature. Robert Lowell's poetry was the source for In Sleep, In Thunder (1982), John Hollander's for the 1994 Of Challenge and Love; while the starting point for Syringa was a poem of the same name by John Ashbery. Yet it is not a conventional setting, neither a song cycle nor a cantata, but something in between. Ashbery's densely allusive text is a retelling of the Orpheus myth, and that Carter allots to a soprano, while his second soloist, a baritone, delivers a succession of fragments in classical Greek that amplify images and ideas from the poem. The result is multi-layered, sometimes contemplative, sometimes dramatic, with the music springing into life from the opening guitar solo and gradually drawing the rest of the ensemble of 12 instrumentalists into the argument. If it is never an easy work to get to grips with, the rewards are enormous, and this performance, conducted by Jeffrey Milarsky, with soprano Lucy Shelton and baritone André Solomon-Glover, succeeds wonderfully in conveying the jostle of literary and musical images. Shelton sings the much smaller-scale Tempo e Tempi, songs with piano to texts by Italian poets, which reveal how much Carter's vocal writing owes to Italian models in general and Monteverdi in particular. Those vocal works are framed by instrumental pieces - the Piano Quintet, and a pungent performance of the Quintet for Piano and Winds from 1991, and miniatures for string quartet and solo piano. |