A one-night stand to remember...

ELLIOTT CARTER with Daniel Barenboim and members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at Orchestra Hall in 1994.

I can't think of a more appropriate way to describe the cellist Yo-Yo Ma's brief involvement with Elliott Carter's Cello Concerto.  Having had some experience with Carter's music in the past (he had played Carter's cello sonata brilliantly according to the composer), Ma must have had a pretty good idea of what to expect when he agreed to have a Carter concerto commissioned for him by the Chicago Symphony.  And the initial perusal of the finished score should have been enough for a musician of Ma's caliber to decide if he finds the music attractive enough to invest time and effort in mastering its numerous challenges.  Whatever went through Ma's head back then, he did learn the concerto, played the world premiere with the Chicago Symphony under Daniel Barenboim in September of 2001, then, a few weeks later, performed it again with the same forces at Carnegie Hall.

And that was it.  As far as I know, Ma has not played the Carter concerto ever since.

Perhaps engagements to play this concerto weren't sufficiently lucrative compared to those where Ma could play the numbingly familiar crowd-pleasers (Schumann, Dvorak, Shostakovich) he had played for decades.  Or maybe Ma decided that public performances of challenging modernist music were incompatible with his status as a beloved 'People's Cellist'.  One thing I know is that Ma had no difficulties with the technical challenges posed by this concerto.  I know this because one of Ma's performances was recorded for broadcast, and the recording documents a performance that is simply stunning not only for the ease and confidence with which Ma dispatches the solo part, but also for his (and Daniel Barenboim's) understanding that, despite its rhythmic complexities and non-tonal harmonic language, Carter's piece should be played as a modernist version of an emotionally turbulent Romantic concerto.

I don't know if the recording was made in Chicago or at Carnegie Hall.  If the latter is the case, it certainly explains why, in his review of the Carnegie Hall performance, the New York Times music critic Anthony Tommasini went far beyond his usual guarded praise of Carter's late period music:

 ...  [H]istory will probably deem the major event of this [concert program] to have been the introduction of Elliott Carter's Cello Concerto... [T]he performance was riveting. At its conclusion, when Mr. Carter, who is 92, climbed the steps to the stage with a cane to steady him, he received a prolonged standing ovation. ... Mr. Ma played [the concerto's] long-lined passages with the lyrical elegance he brings to Dvorak and Bach, surely what Mr. Carter wanted. With his fleet and exact execution of the work's formidably complex rhythmic writing, Mr. Ma sounded like a crack cellist from a cutting-edge contemporary music ensemble. ... There was a sense in the hall that we were party to the introduction of a major work. (New York Times, 22 October 2001)

That this recording has not been commercially released is little short of criminal.  I was lucky to have a copy sent to me from England by a generous fellow Carter enthusiast.  Needless to say, I am happy to add this recording to the blog's collection of Carter's music.