Sony’s Fromm Collection: Carter and Kirchner

Elliott Carter and Leon Kirchner on the original cover of the recording being discussed

Among the recordings in the Twentieth Century Composers Series produced by the Fromm Music Foundation that were part of the library of the campus radio station for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the one that most attracted my attention coupled Elliott Carter’s double concerto, scored for harpsichord and piano with two chamber orchestras, with Leon Kirchner’s concerto for violin and cello, accompanied by ten winds and percussion. That recording has been reproduced as the eighth CD in Sony Classical’s ten-CD anthology of that series. My personal interest was due, in part, to the visiting appointment that brought Carter to MIT during my senior year; and it was through Carter’s visit that I met Kirchner for the first time.

Ironically, most of the classes that Carter taught and the public lectures that he delivered were devoted to music other than his own. That did not prevent me from broadcasting recordings of his music over the course of his visit; and, from my vantage point as a presenter, the high points of those broadcasts involved his second string quartet and the double concerto. The other thing I remember most vividly at that time was a generous amount of talk about “metric modulation,” associating that term with Carter.

Mind you, I never heard Carter invoke that term. However, it can be found in “Happy Birthday, Elliott Carter!,” which Charles Rosen wrote for The New York Review of Books not long after Carter reached the age of 100 on December 11, 2008 and was as actively engaged in composing as he had ever been. Rosen describes the phrase as the “method of superimposing one pulse over another,” which is not particularly consistent with other interpretations of the term “modulation,” associated much more often with harmonic progression.

Rosen was the pianist on the double concerto album, joined by Ralph Kirkpatrick at the harpsichord. It would thus be fair to say that, until his death on December 9, 2012, he was one of the foremost authorities on Carter’s music that could account for both theory and practice. Fortunately (at least for those of us trying to find our way through the many complexities in Carter’s scores), he wrote a much more informative account of Carter’s approach to time and rhythm in a later New York Review article that appeared in the February 9, 2012 issue (sadly behind the Web site’s paywall).

Here is the opening text of Rosen’s article:

A German pre-Romantic philosopher, Johann Georg Hamann, held that the sense of music was given to man to make it possible to measure time. The composer Elliott Carter’s fame comes partly from a reconception of time in music that fits the world of today (although there are many other aspects of his music to enjoy). We do not measure time regularly, like clocks do, but with many differing rates of speed. In the complexity of today’s experience, it often seems as if simultaneous events were unfolding with different measures. These different measures coexist and often blend but are not always rationalized in experience under one central system. We might call this a system of irreconcilable regularities.

In Carter’s music, things happen for different instruments at different tempos—none of them dominates the others, and an idiosyncratic character is often given to the different instruments that preserves their individuality. Carter is never dogmatic, and the different measures of time may occasionally combine briefly for a moment of synthesis. The individuality of tempo and rhythm can make his music difficult to perform as each player unconsciously responds physically to the different rhythms he or she hears and yet tries to preserve his or her own system intact.

Needless to say, it tends to be the case that even the most attentive listeners run into the same problems that confront the performers. Fortunately, Carter frequently could draw upon the services of performers willing to adapt their techniques for both execution and listening to serve the his objectives.

All this should make it clear that the double concerto is not for the “casual” listener. The advantage of a recording is that one can revisit a specific “document of performance” several times. Initially, one should be content with establishing basic orientation around the concerto’s seven sections, all of which are played without intervening pauses. Fortunately, two of those sections are cadenzas, one for harpsichord in the second section and the other for piano in the penultimate section. We thus have a symmetrical framework in which the first cadenza follows the Introduction, while the second one precedes the Coda. Between those cadenzas are three sections identified by familiar tempo markings: Allegro scherzando, Adagio, and Presto. Once one is comfortable within that framework, one can then dive into the ways in which both the soloists and the instruments in the chamber orchestras negotiate the multiplicity of tempos specified in the score; and, in all likelihood, the attentive listener will begin to appreciate Carter’s rhetoric of textures without getting too tangled by the individual threads.

Mind you, that level of awareness is more likely achieved when one can also enjoy the physical presence of the performers. (I lost track of how many hours I spent with the Juilliard Quartet recording of Carter’s second string quartet before encountering it in a recital.) Sadly, where pieces like the double concerto are concerned, the opportunities for a concert performance are precious few. (I have never had that opportunity for the double concerto itself. For that matter, unless I am mistaken, my last concert encounter with Carter came when students at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music prepared his second quartet; and that was over a decade ago!) Nevertheless, when it comes to wanting what you have, the Kirkpatrick-Rosen recording can definitely provide satisfying listening experiences for those willing to give the piece the attention it deserves.

This CD also includes a “bonus selection” that was not on the original vinyl release. The final two tracks are devoted to Carter’s 1946 piano sonata, also recorded by Rosen. The attentive listener will probably find this piece more familiar, particularly in the expressiveness of its rhetoric. The architecture is a bit distinctive, since the sonata consists of only two movements, an opening Maestoso followed by an Andante. However, Ludwig van Beethoven was already tinkering with sonata architectures towards the end of his life; so one can hardly expect traditions from the past to impede listening to this early Carter effort.

That said, the Kirchner concerto feels a bit like a breath of fresh air between the intense rhetoric of the two Carter selections. Mind you, the music has its own inventive devices of complexity. However, perhaps because the accompanying ensemble consists of winds and percussion, there are elements of joyfulness in that rhetoric, if not a bit of slapstick coming from the percussion. Given the high “information content” of the entire album, I would say that this particular CD does not really lend itself start-to-finish listening; but those that do decide to listen that way will probably find Kirchner’s concerto a welcome “change of scene” following the Carter concerto.