Those who missed the train...

... the most interesting American symphonist is the subtle and introspective Roger Sessions.
The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians

Now I know how Schumann must have felt when he first heard the music of Brahms.
Arnold Schoenberg to his pupil Leon Kirchner after listening to a recording of Roger Sessions' Piano Sonata No.2. (Andrea Olmstead, Roger Sessions: A Biography, Routledge, 2008)

The greatest symphonist since Mahler.
Lighton Kerner, The Village Voice

Everybody loves Roger Sessions except the public.
Donal Henahan, New York Times (Roger Sessions' obituary, March 18, 1985)

He always has been an accomplished technician rather than a very original composer.
Harold C. Schonberg, New York Times (March 5, 1976).

[The music] has almost everything but individuality ... and there is little in this score that rises above eclectic academism.
Harold C. Schonberg's 1968 New York Times review of the premiere of Sessions' 8th Symphony (performed by the New York Philharmonic under William Steinberg).
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According to some of the above critical opinions, the complete disappearance of Roger Sessions' orchestral music from public performances should be seen as a proof that the music lacks aesthetic merits required for long-term survival even on the fringes of the standard repertoire.  According to others, it should be seen as a depressing fate of art music in the age ruled by populist demands for instant intelligibility and gratification.
     You can decide for yourself by listening to Sessions' Symphony No.7, recorded live (in stereo) at the October 5, 1967 concert of the Chicago Symphony conducted by Jean Martinon. 

The Blah-Blah Studies

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Geriatric Cool

A 70-year old soloist (Daniel Barenboim) and a 76-year old conductor (Zubin Mehta leading Staatskapelle Berlin) performing a new composition by a 103-year old composer (Elliott Carter) while a famous 87-year old conductor-composer (Pierre Boulez) listens intently from his seat in Row 2.  This kind of Geriatric Cool, captured on HD video at the Berliner Philharmonie (Barenboim's 70th Birthday Concert on November 15, 2012), surely makes old age seem less depressing than it really is.

Why learn difficult scores if all you want is to dance on the podium?

Bernstein ... shows an interest in progressive music only for the sake of publicity or scandal - he doesn't like it - what he likes is American versions of Prokofiev and Shostakovich.
Elliott Carter, letter to Goffredo Petrassi, 11 May 1959*

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* Elliott Carter: A Centennial Portrait in Letters and Documents, F. Meyer and A. C. Shreffler (eds), Paul Sacher Foundation, The Boydell Press, Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2008.

Колыбельная для мизантропов No.2

Another post strictly for fluent Russian speakers.

Could this be true?

In an advance article for the upcoming 1995 Proms premiere of Elliott Carter's Adagio tenebroso, the distinguished music critic (and later Carter's librettist) Paul Griffiths wrote:

[Carter] tells the story of how [in 1994], when he was working with Daniel Barenboim on the first performance of his Partita, Barenboim half-jokingly suggested he ought to write a comic opera next, and he half-jokingly said he would ... if Barenboim could get him a commissioning fee of a million dollars.  A little later, Barenboim came back from Europe to report success: Berlin would pay the required sum. (Times of London, 12 September 1995, italics mine)

A million dollars for a 40-minute long avant-garde opera?  I found it hard to believe, but then I recalled having read somewhere that only a couple of years earlier New York's Metropolitan Opera paid $325,000 commission fee to Philip Glass for his opera The Voyage.  And if Glass could get this much for stretching a few triads worth of musical material over three hours of rhythmic monotony, Carter's reported commission fee for What's Next does not seem all that striking.

Still, I wonder if the actual fee paid to Carter by Berlin's Staatsoper Unter den Linden was indeed the sum mentioned in Griffiths' article.