PROGRAM NOTES BY PAUL AFFELDER AND LEONARD BURKAT

Holiday Overture (1908-) more difficult for the players than the Elliott Carter has been writing music for listeners. almost as long as he could write. When still It is scored for piccolo, two flutes, two a schoolboy, he showed some of his pieces , English horn, two , bass to Charles Ives, whom he greatly admired , two , , although Ives’s importance was then four horns, three , three unknown to most of the musical world. , , , , Ives recommended that he continue his , triangle, , tam-tam, studies at Harvard, but until his senior year slapstick, and strings. Carter majored in English literature. (Copyrighted) Almost at the last moment, he turned towards music and began to study theory Concerto for Piano and No. 2 and composition with Walter Piston and Bela Bartok (1881-1945) Gustav Holst, the English composer who The chief influences on Bartok’s musical was then a visiting professor. style were the folk music of East-Central After graduation, Carter went to Paris Europe and his own virtuosity as a concert for three years of work with Nadia pianist. He developed an individual Boulanger, the great teacher whose manner of keyboard playing, American pupils also include Piston, concentrating on the chordal and Copland and Thomson. On his return, he percussive potentials of the instrument but became musical director of Ballet Caravan he was also influenced by other twentieth­ and later taught at the Peabody century musicians. Conservatory, the Juilliard School of One who had a particularly strong effect Music, the Massachusetts Institute of on him was the American Henry Cowell, Technology and at Columbia, Yale and who introduced what he called “tone­ Cornell Universities. clusters”—groups of notes that lie close Carter’s early works were admired for together on the keyboard and that are their vigor and their solidity. They were produced by employing the fist, the flat of obviously influenced by the music of the the hand or even the whole forearm. When older composers he knew, Stravinsky and the two composers met in London in 1923, Copland, Hindemith and Piston, but Bartok was so impressed by Cowell’s tone­ clearly show an independent and original clusters that he asked and received mind at work. They are strongly rooted in permisson to use them in his own music. the traditional harmony, rich in Bartok composed three piano concertos. contrapuntal textures and free in rhythm. The first dates from 1926, the second from In his later years, after the middle 1940’s, 1931, and the third was not quite finished Carter became one of the most powerful at the time of his death in 1945. inventors among living American The Second Concerto, begun in composers. His music took on a new October, 1930, and completed in weight. The principal works, three string September, 1931, was written in the time quartets and three concerti, are vast in midway between Bartok’s percussive, scale, great in complexity and sometimes aggressive early compositions and the almost overwhelming in dramatic mellower, more strongly melodic creations expression. of his late years. It was first performed at Carter wrote his Holiday Overture while the Festival of the International Society for vacationing on Fire Island, New York, in Contemporary Music in Amsterdam in 1944 a few years before the maturation of 1933 and was soon repeated in other his later style. It is now performed in a European musical centers. revised version made in 1961 that has a The first movement, in which the strings large number of small changes in the do not play, is thematically rich, busy and orchestral writing. The Overture is in the bustling as Bach. The slow, second familiar American musical language of the movement, Adagio, has a constrasting 1940’s, but brilliantly inventive and much scherzo-like middle section, Presto. In the