July 26, 2013

Gone but not forgotten...


The gravestone is less than modest, but then Mozart did not get even this much...  And what does it matter anyway?  If I were a composer, I would rather have people go to concert halls where my music is played than to the cemetery where my corpse is buried.

Which is how Elliott Carter was remembered on June 22, 2013 at the Aldeburgh Festival, where two well-known champions of his music - Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Oliver Knussen, supported by the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group - performed Carter's Dialogues and Dialogues IIThis performance was recorded live by the BBC and was made available for a while as a high quality (320 kbs) webstream.

At about the same time I also came across my second live recording of Carter's Triple Duo, performed by the Belgian group Ensemble Linea on September 27, 2012 in Strasbourg.  One especially attractive feature of this close-balanced but atmospheric recording is its sharply defined spatial separation of the three instrumental groups.