Old, young, and new

Elliott Carter and more at Tanglewood's Festival of Contemporary Music

by Lloyd Schwartz

"It's about hope," the 91-year-old Elliott Carter said when 40-year-old British composer George Benjamin asked him about the nature of his largest orchestral work, "We all need it if we can get it." Carter was ending his stint as composer-in-residence at this year's Festival of Contemporary Music at Tanglewood; Benjamin was directing the festival for the first time. Their conversation preceded the six-day weekend's final event, a large orchestral concert by the fellows of the Tanglewood Music Center, and the last piece on the program was the last movement, "Allegro scorrevole," of the grand symphonic triptych Carter completed in 1996, Sinfonia: Sum fluxae pretium spei ("I am the prize of fleeting hope"). And isn't hope the crucial element of any contemporary arts event?

Between Thursday and Monday evening, woven around and through the BSO's regular three-concert weekend schedule, 10 programs were performed by TMC students, faculty, BSO members, and professional guests. For his contribution to the Sunday-afternoon BSO concert, Carter chose his Variations for Orchestra -- a major work from 1955 that had been performed only once before by the BSO, 36 years ago. And three more recent Carter pieces were receiving their US premieres. Among the other major contemporary composers especially celebrated were Luciano Berio and Pierre Boulez, on their 75th birthdays; George Perle, on his 85th; and Aaron Copland, on the centennial of his birth. Septuagenarian Gunther Schuller and octogenarian serialist Milton Babbitt were both represented and present. And old masters György Ligeti and Luigi Dallapiccola received eloquent performances of extraordinary, unfamiliar pieces.

The program was conservative in its emphasis on American and European white-male elder statesmen. There were only four pieces by women (one of whom, Ruth Crawford Seeger, died in 1953), even fewer by minorities, and shockingly little by anyone under 40. Yet the most exciting, daring, and -- especially in Carter's case -- youthful music seemed to be supplied by the older generation.

The festival kicked off with an astounding exercise: three and a half hours' worth (including two intermissions) of all 14 of Berio's Sequenzas -- his études/scherzi/fantasies for solo instruments, composed between 1958 (flute) and 1995 (bassoon; accordion). The clarinet (1980) and saxophone (1981) Sequenzas are identical, yet the earlier, played by BSO clarinettist Thomas Martin, had a songful lyricism, whereas the latter, with super-saxist Kenneth Radnofsky, projected an angular, edgy intensity.

These were not originally meant to be played together, so Benjamin, with Berio's advice, created an engaging sequence of Sequenzas in musical rather than chronological order, beginning with Canadian trumpeter Guy Few's blitz of blistering cries and resonating whispers (emerging from within the lid of a "silent piano") and Italian violin virtuoso Francesco d'Orazio's lighter-than-air prestissimo/pianissimo folk dance, and ending with BSO violist Michael Zaretsky's shivering, bow-hair-shredding solo, Radnofsky's saxophone, and Joseph Petric's haunting, rueful moonlight-on-the-Seine accordion "Chansons." Near the evening's end, I decided bumper stickers were in order: I SURVIVED ALL THE SEQUENZAS. But I was also touched by the vastness of the project, and by the way these pieces became a kind of extended fanfare, a cellular introduction to everything -- instrumental, vocal, and spiritual -- the festival would later encompass.

The Sequenzas also have their theatrical side (emphasized in Paula Suozzi's staging), though we probably could have done without the awful verses that Berio's friend Edoardo Sanguineti intoned in English between each piece ("Your profile is one of my frenzied landscapes"; "My capricious fury was once your livid calm"). BSO trombonist R. Douglas Wright clowned impressively in the Sequenza dedicated to a famous Italian clown ("Why?" he screamed, lifting his arms to form the letter Y). And soprano Lucy Shelton delivered -- no, lived -- the bravura vocal solo (Sequenza III), slipping from giggling to cackling, from yawning to chirping, from pathetic whispers to a case of the sobbing sulks, to the sounds of a diva vocalizing, all in Berio's nonverbal syllables. Her volatile moodshifts as she wriggled around her easy chair created a dramatic emotional progression -- a virtual opera -- out of these abstract sounds. It was sensational.

At a later vocal concert, Shelton sang the US premiere of Carter's latest song cycle, Tempo e tempi ("Time and Tempos"), where her monolithic performance never quite captured Carter's intricate, mercurial responses to eight short poems by 20th-century Italian masters (Montale, Ungaretti, and Quasimodo) about time passing and shifting, about shades of light, about the differences between "addio" and "arrivederci" (Carter has written that "at a certain age, one anxiously hopes to hear `arrivederci' more frequently than `addio' "). At Monadnock Music last summer, soprano Susan Narucki (who also supplied helpful spoken translations, which no one did at Tanglewood) and the accompanying quartet -- oboe, clarinet, violin, and cello -- gave the "world premiere" of six of the eight songs, and she came closer to conveying the nuances and poignant insinuations of what may be Carter's most personal cycle.

The other Carter premiere was the marvelous ASKO Concerto, which he composed for the Dutch chamber orchestra ASKO and which it first performed last April. Dazzling solos, duets, trios, and a quintet emerge from the larger texture in surprising combinations (exquisitely soulful cello with bass clarinet and trombone; tickling piccolo, harp, and xylophone) and in a wide emotional range, ending with a stunning comic turn for solo bassoon that was played with uncommon sensitivity and humor by Tanglewood fellow Jenni Groyon. Conductor Stefan Asbury ensured an eloquent shapeliness.

That program began with a rather tentative -- despite Carter's suggestions in rehearsal (lucky students to be working directly with the master) -- performance of his little fanfare for the 70th birthday of his BBC friend, William Glock, who died this past June. The three student trumpeters and BSO percussionist Frank Epstein then repeated the piece, this time with the jokes -- the hints of "Happy Birthday" in an off-kilter fugue, the final single chord for chimes (a pun on "Glock," the German word for bell) -- perfectly timed.

There were three other thrilling performances of Carter. One had the smallest forces: the stupendous hands of pianist Ursula Oppens (a long-time Carter champion), who played the brief Two Diversions, which combined gravity and air in breathtaking metrical contrasts with gorgeous romantic songfulness.

The two others required the largest forces. The neglected Variations is one of Carter's most elegantly organized works, with variations on one side of a still center mirroring those on the other side while two accompanying themes speed up and slow down in opposite directions. Guest conductor Robert Spano led the BSO with a suppleness, clarity, and rhythmic drive that surpassed any of the recordings (it also helped just to see who was playing).

Spano surrounded the Carter with charged, tensile, witty performances of Mozart (the Don Giovanni Overture and the Prague Symphony) and the first (and better) of Prokofiev's two violin concertos, with Siberian virtuoso Vadim Repin making a better impression than he did in the Brahms Concerto he played with the Concertgebouw at Symphony Hall last season. The audience cheered him, so he returned with an encore -- a technically staggering yet hilarious set of variations on the familiar (from countless commercials and cornet solos) Carnival of Venice.

Among the non-Carter festival highlights was Brief Encounters, the new string quartet -- his Ninth -- by George Perle. Fourteen short movements (several less than a minute) are divided into three larger sections, and here each section was played by a different student foursome. This is a work most astonishing (especially at a new-music event) for its sense of inner quietude. It rarely rises above a whisper. Yet there's tremendous variety of inflection. It is always "speaking," and so you can't fail to listen.

Perhaps the most controversial item was Pierre Boulez's 1996-1998 Sur incises ("About cuts" -- "cuts" as in film or sound editing), a 45-minute piece for three pianos, three harps, and three percussionists playing mostly mallet instruments that can sound like bells (marimba, vibraphones, steel drum, glockenspiel). Boulez has been gradually expanding it from the germ of a four-minute piano solo that, unfortunately, wasn't included on the program. After an introduction that sounds like Debussy strumming a flamenco guitar, Sur incises turns into a fantasy for glittering sprays of glissandos and arpeggios. Live music on real instruments imitates electronic textures, only it sounds more colorful and more erotic. The program notes mention a musical change about halfway through, but this was inaudible to me. Some people were clearly bewildered. But I was enchanted by the performance (by professionals, not students) -- and hypnotized.

There was also music that combined "real" electronics or tape with acoustic instruments (the most substantial being the late French composer Gérard Grisey's watery "musique spectrale" Le temps et l'écume -- "Time and Spume") and even a smattering of minimalism, most notably Morton Feldman's elegantly monotonous Coptic Light, his 20-minute, triple pianissimo (though played somewhat louder), relentlessly static contemplation of the figures in a Persian rug, with a subtle but startlingly conclusive ending. The best of the younger composers was clearly George Benjamin, who represented himself by the exciting Viola, Viola (a pulsating, interlocking viola duet) and the bewitching Palimpsest, which he composed for Pierre Boulez's 75th-birthday tour with the London Symphony Orchestra. Benjamin himself directed a splendid, intimate performance with the Tanglewood fellows. He's been very lucky with his conductors.

The festival closed with Benjamin in charge of the vast orchestra of fellows in that "Allegro scorrevole" -- the same marking Carter used in his First String Quartet a half-century ago to suggest the "scurrying" of creatures and dust in the Arizona desert. Here, in the airy perpetual-motion oodly-oodling of high woodwinds, it depicts the wind-buffeted movement of a bubble "that floats over the earth," as Carter told Benjamin, "and sees its sadness and joy, then floats away into the air" (with a final diminuendo, high up in the piccolo, that Carter said was "more meaningful than a lot of Prussian marching"). Like much of Carter, this music was inspired by a poem (he was an English major at Harvard): a translation of Richard Crashaw's 17th-century Latin "Bulla" ("The Bubble"), his ironic image for his own work.

Before this moving, airborne performance, Carter talked about his delight in working with these students, who want to learn things "professional orchestra players already know too much about." Which is why both these gifted students and the professionals who participate in events like the Festival of Contemporary Music deserve our continuing applause. As the man says, "It's about hope."