Quite a Concert in Store for Us!

Tribeca Film Festival and Fondazione Prada Present: The Music of Elliott Carter: a Docu-Concert with film by Frank Scheffer; performances by clarinetists Charles Neidich and Ayako Oshima, violinist Rolf Schulte, cellist Fred Sherry, pianists Christopher Oldfather and Charles Rosen. Prada, 575 Broadway at Prince Street, NY, NY. May 6, 2004.

'Carter in Prada.' This sounds like a nonsequitur. No, Elliott Carter was not dressed in Prada duds, but he was prominently featured in the Prada Soho store.

Anyone who has been to this new store knows that it is an unusual experience. It's shopping as a theatrical event. As one enters, greeted by a small army of mannequins all looking in the same direction, one descends a stairway one level into an artificial valley which then comes back up with another stairway. Essentially the middle of the store is a large valley with two large hills on either side. One hill is partially a large roller-coaster-like ramp.

For this concert, a little window in this wooden hill opened and provided a small stage area, complete with movie screen. The audience sat on the other side of this wooden valley. "Prada boys," young gentlemen of striking pulchritude, dressed in black pants and white tops (perhaps former Chippendales renegades?) delivered white wine and mineral water. And Elliott Carter was in the midst of this all, giving a small filmed interview just before the event.

My understanding is that the film on Elliott Carter by Frank Scheffer is a 90-minute essay on the life of this great contemporary composer. For the Prada event, film excerpts were shown, each of which described a piece of music which was subsequently played live.

And what players there were! Performing were, essentially, the top new music instrumentalists in New York, so let's follow them as they navigate Carter's churning waters:

Among the chamber works on this concert, solo pieces stand out. For reasons of comprehension, I appreciate the brief length of Carter's Figment #1 (1994) and Figment #2 (2001) both for solo cello played convincingly, as usual, by new music master Fred Sherry. I was particularly impressed by the second "figment" in which lyrical melodic lines come mysteriously out of the turbulent Carter metrics.

The concert opener, Con Leggerezza Pensosa (1990) was a trio performed by three great new music players, Sherry, the impressive Carter aficionado, clarinetist Charles Neidich and new music storm trooper, violinist Rolf Schulte. One knows by this lineup that the performance will be a knockout. It was, but what struck me through this complex aural experience was the sense of balance in Carter's work. Things would happen here, and they would happen there, pitches here, other pitches there, phrases here, phrases there, varied. It all hangs together somehow, and Carter uses aural "puns" or pitches which reoccur in different guises and different phrases. The attentive listener can actually hear this stuff. I don't find this balance and clarity in every Carter work that I have heard, but it certainly was present in this wonderful opener.

For me, personally, there were a couple of letdowns. Duo for Violin and Piano (1974), performed authoritatively by pianist Christopher Oldfather and violinist Rolf Schulte was excessively long and, although an insistence on double and possibly triple stops on the violin repeated and repeated creates a genre of minimalism for this maximalist composer, it lost my attention after a while. I thought the brevity of some of the later pieces served Carter's purposes and premises better. Christopher Oldfather and Rolf Schulte are a couple of the best new music performers around. I'm beginning to wonder a bit, however, about Mr. Schulte's approach, with his tight, short grip of the bow and, despite his unerring precision, a kind of strident technique that brings into the mind, against one's wishes, the image of slicing sausages.

More successful was a solo work for clarinet, Gra (1993) played by Charles Neidich. This piece uses multiphonics, or pitches which are overblown so that an audible chord results. Here is an instance in which the film excerpt before the piece provided a valuable insight. Carter mentions in the film that the German clarinet and the French clarinet intone these multiphonics differently. Due to this discrepancy, he had to make some alterations. I thought this was a good illustration of the care and precision that goes into an Elliott Carter work. This is no "Play it Again, Sam…"

Pianist-author-scholar Charles Rosen is, as everybody connected with music knows, the exceptional polymath. He's all over the place, and known for his definitive books such as The Classical Style (Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven) which has sat on my bookshelf, and everybody else's, for decades. He is also an expert on the piano and piano literature. He's a very good pianist. However, for whatever reason, he tended to "slop over" Elliott Carter's Piano Sonata (1946). This is a fun earlier work of Carter's, with recognizable tonal and jazz elements. Was Rosen just seriously out of practice with this piece? He would gloss over complex passages, half playing them and then, fortunately, landing on the right conclusions. Sometimes even parallel octaves were missed. Oh well, I was having a good time anyway. Maybe I just needed another drink from the "Prada boys."

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Quite a Concert in Store for Us!