Carter’s ‘Love’: Accessible but Still Challenging

Elliott Carter has for a very, very long time been one of America’s most respected--but dreaded--composers. His music is of a complexity that challenges general audiences and professional musicians alike, even though the effort it requires rewards the listener with wondrous and meaningful insight into our age of anxiety and how we cope with it.

Lately, however, Carter is starting to be loved. The change has occurred because performances of his music have gotten better, players no longer worry themselves or listeners over its rhythmic complexities, and everyone can relax a little.

And there has been a change in Carter’s music, as well. He is now 88, and he has been living a marvelous old age, writing music that, while still difficult, is more accessible and displays a mellow, enriching glow. Hence, “Of Challenge and Love”--Carter’s recent collection of five songs for soprano and piano, which was heard for the first time Thursday night at the Museum of Tolerance as part of the Southwest Chamber Music Society series--seems a particularly telling title.

The songs are to poems by John Hollander, and Carter says in his program notes that he was drawn to the poetry’s undercurrent of irony and deep anxiety. Hollander, however, is not a poet with the open mind, let alone structural freedom, of, say, John Ashbery, whom Carter has also set. Carter, thus, has set himself the task of trying to create a music that never settles down, despite the poem’s formal and flashy metrical structure.

Carter’s solution is to set Hollander’s rhythms against a much more turbulent sea of musical rhythmic currents, and thus free the words, like individual fish, to swim with it and against it.

The performance by the veteran soprano Phyllis Bryn-Julson and pianist Gayle Blankenburg was a cautious one, however, that seemed too much in keeping with the old days of Carter performances. The piano part is formidable, especially in the madly impetuous accompaniment to the first song, “High on Our Tower,” a nasty little turning of the world of love on its tail. Here it was far too slow and plodding. Bryn-Julson is a secure singer and she achieved some stunning climaxes, but she needed a more flexible partner.

Carter was surrounded on this occasion by Mel Powell, composer and teacher at CalArts, and like Carter, both a modernist and Pulitzer Prize winner. Powell’s music winks at the listener a bit more than Carter’s does, and the “Little Companion Pieces” are elegant in their fleeting application of a variety of poetic texts. A lot gets compressed into a little, and Bryn-Julson and a string quartet composed of the Society’s players seemed more at ease here.

After intermission, Bryn-Julson lightened the air with Powell’s charming “Letter to a Young Composer,” with its funny insights into tricks of the trade, and Blankenburg joined the quartet for Schumann’s Piano Quintet in E flat. The quintet’s presence was meant to remind us that both Powell and Carter have expressed admiration for Schumann’s ability to capture fleeting thoughts quickly and, as if they were butterflies, let them go before they alight. It was, instead, a ponderous reading.

* The Southwest Chamber Music Society will repeat the program tonight at 8, Pasadena Presbyterian Church, 585 E. Colorado Blvd. $10-$20. (800) 726-7147.