Never too busy for this...

A few more live recordings of Carter's music came my way, and I thought I should not delay adding them to the blog.

A Good Friday indeed...

Any day of the week on which I would come across my first live recording of a favorite piece by Elliott Carter would be a good day.  It just happened to be this Friday, so I am happy to think of this day as my "Good Friday".
    
The piece in question is Triple Duo, performed by the Doelen Ensemble on Dec. 4, 2008 at the Muziekgebouw aan't IJ in Amsterdam.  Although the old studio recording by the Fires of London (on Nonesuch) is splendid in every respect, there is no substitute for hearing Carter's playful music in a live recording which captures face to face, real-time communication between musicians and their audience.

Femiquavers

 In the real world, the average life expectancy of a woman is significantly greater than that of a man.  In the world of opera, by contrast, the average life expectancy of a lead female character is, to put it mildly, less than modest.  If she does not succumb to a fashionable disease in the prime of her life (La Traviata, La Boheme), she can look forward to being stabbed, strangled, or poisoned by a jealous lover (Carmen, Wozzeck), husband (Otello, Il Tabarro, I Pagliacci, Violanta), brother (La forza del destino), or rival (Rigoletto, Adriana Lecouvreur).  On those rare occasions when the plot does not provide any of the already listed sources of early death, the soprano is expected to do the dark deed herself (La Gioconda, Madama Butterfly) or at least die of a broken heart brought about by sexual exploitation and emotional abuse in the hands of various men in her life (Manon Lescaut, Der Ferne Klang, Die Gezeichneten).  Even in operas with nominally optimistic endings the soprano may still meet with premature (and violent) death, if only as part of some lurid fantasy in the mind of the male protagonist (Die tote Stadt).

In memoriam Elliott Carter

Elliott Carter's sunny, playful, and inexhaustibly interesting music has given me countless hours of joy and happiness. 

May it do the same for you.

What a great life it was!

E L L I O T T   C A R T E R

R.  I.  P.

Mongoloids on the loose...

In the manual for Marantz CD player model CD5004, the initial overview of the remote control functions describes volume control buttons as "amplifier operation buttons".  A footnote at the bottom of that page explains this mysterious description to puzzled readers with the following promise:

The supplied remote control can operate Marantz amplifiers.

Six pages later, the reader gets additional details on how to connect the CD player's special remote control output to a Marantz amplifer.  After making this connection and changing the setting of the special switch in the back of the CD player unit from INTERNAL to EXTERNAL, one can use the remote control to operate the said amplifer.

But what about those lost souls who do not wish to use Marantz amplifers?  For them the manual provides the following reassuring note:

To use this unit without connecting it to the amplifier, set the remote control switch to “INTERNAL”.

If you buy this CD player, you will quickly discover that, with the above mentioned switch in the back set to INTERNAL, the remote control indeed operates the CD player - except for the volume control function!  Having reached the state of despair, you will call Marantz customer support and, with your mouth open, will hear a youthful male voice cheerfully informing you that the volume control function works only when the remote control operates Marantz amplifiers!

At that point, you will feel like a guy who married a gorgeous woman after having been told that she can fuck the mailman.  (Well, the guy thought, "can" does not mean "will".  And anyway, even if shit happens, as they say, I'd still get a quickie now and then...)  Alas, after putting on a tuxedo, saying "I do", and kissing the bride, the guy discovered that his newly-minted wife will fuck only the mailman!

And so, once again, you will have confirmed that today's world is a welcoming place for the likes of the imbeciles who designed that CD player, the cretins who approved the design for manufacturing, the retards who wrote the manual, and (most of all) the fucking mongoloids at the so-called high end audio magazine Stereophile, who wrote an enthusiastic review of this player without ever noting that it is all but useless to those who want to connect the CD player directly to a power amplifier.   (I suppose the delusional sociopaths at Stereophile have been too busy comparing the musicality of various power cords and gold-plated wall outlets to pay attention to such mundane facts...)

By the way, if you think that such cognitively disadvantaged specimens will never get a job designing Boeing and Airbus jetliners (and writing manuals for pilots and maintenance mechanics), good luck boarding that plane on your next vacation or business trip....