Word: symphonia
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Elliott Carter’s recent orchestral music is a synthesis of synergetic sound and syntactical brilliance, a culmination of more than seven decades of original, cutting-edge ideas. When the Monadnock Festival Orchestra finished playing the American premiere of Carter’s Symphonia in Sanders Theatre last week, there was no question that one of the most important music events of recent times had just taken place. This is tough, gritty music that demands the most attentive of listeners, and the 50-plus minutes of Symphonia were at times overwhelming...
...wrote his first opera two years ago and Yo-Yo Ma ’76 recently premiered his cello concerto with the Chicago Symphony. His intense but accessible modernism is a welcome change from the watered-down simplicity of many of today’s new orchestral works. Symphonia, subtitled Sum fluxae pretium spei (“I am the prize of flowing hope” from 17th-century metaphysical poet Richard Crashaw’s “Bulla”), actually existed as three separate pieces before Carter combined them into one work...
...movements were written for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the Cleveland Orchestra; Carter worked on them from 1992 to 1996. Although Oliver Knussen and the BBC Orchestra premiered and recorded Symphonia in its entirety on Deutsche Gramophone, the work as a whole had never been played in the U.S. until last week...
...first movement was too long, aimless and lacking in a sense of overarching structure, as every quarter-note beat was pounded out. Lifschitz succeeded much better in the lyrical middle movement, but it was back to slow, calculated playing in the final movement. Luckily, Carter’s Symphonia had left such a strong impression that the problematic Brahms could not eclipse the memory of its grandeur...
...music, but don't expect the opium-filled fun of Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique. The musical elements are too literal to invite creative interpretation and at times it seemed repetitive in its use of musical devices. An overly-dramatic orchestra might have felt compelled to dilute parts of the Symphonia Domestica into a pre-Stravinsky and Debussy prototype. Many arpeggios sound very much like those of Debussy. And it is true that some percussion lines sound so much like The Rite of Spring that a timpani-player might have to hold himself back in order to play it as Strauss...