Elliott Carter Hears the World Making Its Own Special Sounds

Elliott Carter, the distinguished American composer who turns 90 on Dec. 11, is not a visionary. His music is a reflection of the society around him, of how we live our lives, of and how our brains process information. He is more a Mozart, finding the sublime in the quotidian, than a wildly visionary Beethoven, seeking new worlds. He calmly continues to compose, and his latest work, Quintet for Piano and String Quartet, had its first performance Wednesday at the Library of Congress in Washington and was repeated Sunday afternoon at the opening of a new season of Coleman Concerts at Caltech’s Beckman Auditorium.

Yet it was in the company of two of Beethoven’s otherworldly works that the Arditti String Quartet and pianist Ursula Oppens chose to introduce the new Carter quintet. And it was the right thing to do for several reasons. The British-based Arditti is an ensemble dedicated to our century, and the only work written before 1900 in its repertory is Beethoven’s “Grosse Fuge,” which could easily have passed for 20th century music in its exciting performance. Oppens is also a noted American champion of modern music, but she is, as well, a compelling Beethoven player who brought out the striking modern elements in Beethoven’s penultimate piano sonata, Opus 110.

What Oppens and the Arditti succeeded in doing with this context was to show that while Beethoven, at the end of his life, may not have written for his time, he certainly wrote for ours. His late music is disjointed, full of unusual effects and very complex. We listen in awe as he, through the force of his will and profound technique, brings together these disconnected strands. His audiences, though, heard only incoherence.

One can say exactly the same for Carter. Beethoven’s language made Carter’s possible, even though Carter chooses to express something different with it. There are, moreover, two special qualities Carter shares with late Beethoven--a ferocious independence of spirit and an ability to create textures of utter luminosity in which every note seems to stand for something.

The new quintet is wonderful music, sublime and playful as Mozart but also transcendent enough to keep very good company with late Beethoven. It begins with a sharp percussive note from the piano that sets off a flurry from the strings. Another sharp piano attack and another and another. The first violin has a lofty, unbroken line that wends its way ever higher. The other strings try to break in and take over. The piano insistently bangs for attention.

The voices of the quintet retain their independence over its 16-minute course but also remain in close dialogue. One effects a mood change, and the others follow at their own speeds with their own personalities, as the quintet progresses into a fast scurrying section or a dramatically emphatic one.

There is a moment of radiant quiet, where the strings hold long notes of twinkling high harmonics, but the piano bursts in and breaks it up. The strings come to a strong, determined cadence at the end, but again the piano gets the last word in with a plunked G-sharp afterward. The quintet ends with a smile. Carter has written serious, beautiful, wise music that reminds us that life is also in the details, the small interruptions. He makes us feel very alive.

The performances all afternoon were a joy. The quartet (violinists Irvine Arditti and Graeme Jennings, violist Dov Scheindlin and cellist Rohan de Saram) and Oppens play with supreme conviction. They understand every facet of multifaceted music, Beethoven’s and Carter’s, and convey it with fabulous virtuosity.

I can think of no better place to be so exposed to the workings of our world than from the same Caltech stage that many of the greatest minds of our century have used to describe the universe. Yet, the Coleman Concerts provided no introduction in the program notes to this new quintet or to Carter’s recent Fifth String Quartet, which the Arditti also played (as it had at the Monday Evening Concerts in the spring)not even Carter’s own short notes about these pieces, not even a list of movements in the quartet. There was a good house at first, but many fled early, bewildered.