MUSIC REVIEW : Elliott Carter Under Green Umbrella

Elliott Carter, who turned 85 last month, is a master. Everyone knows that.

His music isn’t particularly accessible. Everyone knows that too.

He even knows it himself.

“The people who spend a lot of effort on my music find it very rewarding,” he said in a Times interview a few days ago. “I’ve always thought, to tell the truth, that I was really not writing for an audience, but writing for performers playing the music.”

Insiders were not surprised when Carter was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1985. They were a bit amused, however, when they realized that the honor would be bestowed by a liberal, dauntlessly supportive connoisseur of creative esoterica named Ronald Reagan.

Ronald Reagan? Ronald Reagan! Chacun a son degout , and all that.

Monday night--despite dissonance, rain, aftershocks and crumbled freeways--Carter drew a reasonably large audience to the Japan America Theatre, where the Los Angeles Philharmonic offered a belated birthday concert as part of its endangered Green Umbrella series. Our former president was not spotted in the crowd.

Never mind. The audience was discerning, respectful and receptive. It mustered a standing ovation at the end, when the composer took the stage to congratulate his canny interpreters and take a reticent bow. The performances were appreciative.

Still, no one left the hall whistling. Elliott Carter never wrote tunes in the obvious, conventional sense. He never courted the masses. He was content to fascinate the loyal cognoscenti, and occasionally to mystify them.

It is a cliche--and not a particularly useful one--to claim that Carter created his own definition of melody, fractured it and then used it as a linear means toward a non-linear end. His music changed its accents and its ingredients, along with its structural philosophies, over the decades.

He never made the listening easy. He never offered a direct appeal to the gut.

For better or worse, Carter remains a thinking man’s composer. That also makes him a composer’s composer. It was none less than Igor Stravinsky who judged Carter’s Double Concerto, which brought the Green Umbrella program to its climactic close, as the first true American masterpiece.

This composer never compromised, never allowed concessions. He dealt in compression where others opted for expansion. He focused on tiny details, and the juxtaposition of vastly disparate tiny details, where others toyed with the grandiose line and the whomping cadence.

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His music, cerebral to a fault, has always revealed its complex secrets, gradually, to anyone able to analyze it, and to anyone patient enough to return for repeated hearings. Carter’s music is the sort that can give academia a good name.

The three difficult pieces presented under the shade of the Green Umbrella represented Carter in three different phases of his career. The evolutionary contrasts proved instructive.

The Sonata for cello and piano, written in 1948, documents the decline, if not the decay, of neoclassicism. It is taut and compact, more forbidding at the outset than in the movements that follow. Essentially, it is an inspired duet for two stressful virtuosos who speak at the same time, refuse to listen to each other, yet follow expressive courses that turn out to be oddly compatible.

Gloria Lum, the cellist, and Gloria Cheng, the pianist, unraveled its knots brilliantly.

“In Sleep, in Thunder,” written in 1981, finds Carter responding crisply, even wildly, to the manic mood swings of late poems by Robert Lowell. The jagged vocal lines defy the laws of conventional lyricism; they also ignore the stresses of conventional drama. They do provide a central force, however, to offset the contrapuntal comments of Carter’s frantic little orchestra.

Thomas Young was the bravely accurate if somewhat monochromatic tenor soloist. Oliver Knussen, making his last appearance of the season as conductor, enforced clarity and momentum amid the crafty chaos.

The Double Concerto for harpsichord, piano and two chamber orchestras, written in 1961, still makes a mighty noise in many, marvelous ways. The keyboard sounds are delicately balanced and subtly contrasted. The orchestral output--don’t call it accompaniment--lends new layers of meaning to the concept of purposeful busyness. The percussive interplay provides heroically assertive punctuation.

Knussen functioned as artful referee among the friendly antagonists: Grant Gershon at the discreetly amplified harpsichord, Gloria Chen at the piano, and some obviously inspired members of the Philharmonic New Music Group.

It was a good night for rugged individualism.