MUSIC : Chamber Group Is Offering Works Rarely Heard in O.C. : Elliott Carter is seldom performed, but his “Night Fantasies” and Duo for violin and piano will be heard in Newport and Orange.

By many lights, Elliott Carter, at 81, is the pre-eminent living and working American classical music composer.

Two Pulitzer Prizes, two Guggenheim Fellowships, an American Prix de Rome and a New York Music Critics Circle Award are among many honors his countrymen have bestowed on him.

Stravinsky, no sluggard in the innovation and importance departments, considered Carter’s Double Concerto, composed in 1961, the “first true American masterpiece.”

His Violin Concerto was premiered May 2 by the San Francisco Symphony with soloist Ole Boehn.

Yet Orange County audiences have had few opportunities to hear Carter’s music live.

The Southwest Chamber Music Society will provide several opportunities when it offers two Carter works--”Night Fantasies” for piano and the Duo for violin and piano--in concerts Thursday at Chapman College in Orange and Saturday at the Newport Harbor Art Museum in Newport Beach.

“One of the most important ideas of Carter’s music is the confrontation of opposing forces,” the group’s founding director Jeff von der Schmidt said last week. “In ‘Night Fantasies,’ that whole relationship is internalized, because there is only one performer. But in the Duo, the protagonist-antagonist, hero-heroine relationship is perfected.”

In fact, at the first performances of the Duo, which was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic, the players sat about 30 feet apart to emphasize the contrasts.

“It was not a successful solution,” von der Schmidt admitted, “but it underscores a dramatic sense of these opposing forces, that sense of drama that will help any listener love Carter’s music.”

Widely regarded as a successful maverick who, unlike many other contemporary composers, did not build his reputation by staying within an academic institution, Carter nonetheless holds honorary doctorates from no fewer than nine universities and conservatories.

He began composing in the ‘30s, but his distinctive style began to emerge in 1951 with his First String Quartet, when he decided to kick over writing to please anyone but himself.

The music that followed that decision has been cited--and criticized--for its immense complexity and density of texture.

But it has also wafted Carter to lofty artistic heights and brought him the financial security--rare for a classical composer--of being able to pick and choose from among a host of commissions offered him.

Getting others to love Carter’s music is clearly part of von der Schmidt’s mission. Images start tumbling into the conversation.

“The opening (of the Duo) is very much like a man trying to climb a glacier,” von der Schmidt said. “The piano is very static, and the violin is very changeable.”

The work, dedicated to Carter’s wife, Helen, also is “literally about love,” he ventured.

“It is most appropriately perceived as the communication between two sleepers at night, as dreams come and go,” he said. “Sometimes a dream is nightmarish; sometimes it is very Pucklike.”

On the other hand, he called “Night Fantasies” a “song cycle without words . . . in the long tradition of solo piano music that is reflective and quiet.”

“Even though these works are sometimes very difficult to play, the end result is a type of reflection,” von der Schmidt said.

Other examples of the type include Ives’ Concord Sonata and Copland’s Sonata, but also Schumann’s “Papillons” and “Kreisleriana.”

In fact, Carter works very much like a classical composer, “chiseling out his material from specific intervals and grouping them together,” von der Schmidt said.

In “Night Fantasies,” the intervals are consonant ones--perfect fourths and perfect fifths. In the Duo, “he works different combinations of intervals that the (piano and violin) do or do not share. That will apply to the rhythmic schemes as well.”

But von der Schmidt said he hopes that the music will triumph over mere appreciation of its technical achievements.

“In human, emotional terms,” he said, “Carter’s music is extremely reflective of our own time, in that all of us have more than one thing on our minds at any time. Call-waiting is a normal example of how the world has forced us into a position of thinking of more than one thing at a time. Carter reflects that in his own music.”

The composer’s discipline “very much ensures that there is no anarchy involved.

“If the performance is precise,” he continued, “one will have the sense of energy and excitement in the same way, in the same sense of building, as in a Beethoven string quartet.”

Von der Schmidt conceded that there are moments when Carter’s music can sound chaotic. When Carter brings all his compositional elements together, the result can seem “like the big bang,” he said.

“But that’s the point from time to time,” he said. “And if listeners (sometimes) feel in a middle of a whirl of sound, they can trust that Carter’s sense of timing and drama will reward them with moments of extreme stillness and calm. He knows how to balance music that is very active and music that is very serene.

“Carter to me is most emotional when the texture is simple. The difficulty is that people expect the texture to be simple at all times, that perception can be without effort. But there is nothing for them to be afraid of.”

Works by Elliott Carter will be played on Southwest Chamber Music Society concerts at 8 p.m. on Thursday at Salmon Recital Hall, Chapman College in Orange; and at 8 p.m. on Saturday at Newport Harbor Art Museum, 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach. Completing the programs will be piano quartets by Mozart and Schumann. Tickets at both locations: $12. Information: (213) 669-5303.