How To Write A Classical Music Review

So, we think we heard you saying you don't know what all the recent fuss over almost-centenarian composer Elliott Carter is all about — beyond his being some five months shy of his 100th birthday and still active as a composer, that is. We confess that knowing as little of his work as we do, we didn't either — until we read this:

The first piece was one of those recent efforts, the 2003 fanfare Call, in a bright titular wake-up by horn player Michael Winter and trumpeters Brynn Rector and Christopher Coletti. It was a reminder right off the bat of Carter’s ability to turn typically "Carteresque" gestures to varied ends with context and orchestration; here the familiar trope of busy trills, fluttertonguing, and staccato mutterings coalescing into homophonic chords was like a sudden collective memory, a centripetal conversation that comes around to a shared anecdote.

Conductor Leo McFall led a performance of the Asko Concerto (2000) marked by beautifully saturated color. It’s one of a handful of recent Carter works that take the form of mini-orchestra concerti, tutti perorations alternating with often unlikely duos, trios, etc. The instrumental combinations are particularly arresting in this piece: clarinet and double bass harmonics with marimba/harp/piano sparks, cello with bass clarinet, trombone, and pizzicato strings, &c. The performance showed the expressive possibilities that have opened up for Carter’s music as the steady advance of technical proficiency has caught up with his vocabulary: that cello solo, for example (played by Marie-Michel Beauparlant), came off as positively Brahmsian. The piece also showed, in a particularly clear way, the complex relationship between rhythm and pulse and meter in Carter’s music. There was much of his penchant for fast music in slow tempi and slow music in fast tempi, but the fairly constant underlying pulse, even when it was more visible than heard, gave a sense of how much more than just a means of coordination meter is for Carter; it’s the tie that binds, the underlying connection between the instrumental individuals, linking them in common cause no matter how fractious the argument.

In those two grafs, one can almost — almost — hear the music, one can, and all by themselves those grafs are hint enough to make that recent fuss seem not the least bit unreasonable.

But there's more. Lots more, which you can read in two parts here and here.

There will surely be other reviews of these two concerts in the MSM, but we can assure you, with little possibility of our being in error, that nowhere will you read reviews more richly telling — or more poetic — than these two.

What's that? Who wrote them?

Don't waste time asking unnecessary questions. Click over and read them. That's what the bloody links are for, you silly person.