AMERICAN CLASSICS Elliott CARTER

559151bk Carter USA 17/12/2003 08:42 pm Page 5 The Nashville Symphony Kenneth Schermerhorn Under the leadership of Music Director Kenneth Schermerhorn for the past twenty years, the Grammy-nominated One of today’s most distinguished and versatile conductors, Kenneth Schermerhorn has been Music Director of the AMERICAN CLASSICS Nashville Symphony is widely regarded as the cornerstone of the performing arts in Middle Tennessee. With more Nashville Symphony since 1983. He is equally at ease with symphonic repertoire, opera and ballet. His experience, than 200 performances annually, the Symphony offers local audiences a range of Classical, Pops and Pied Piper presence and dynamic programming have been applauded by audiences and critics worldwide, not least through children’s series concerts, as well as a variety of special events. A true cultural ambassador for the citizens of his recordings, which include a number of Naxos releases of American music, part of a new series. Earlier Nashville, the Nashville Symphony also shares its artistry with national and international audiences through its recordings include pioneering discs of music by Villa-Lobos, Richard Strauss, and Glazunov with the Hong Kong Elliott Fourth of July concerts, which are broadcast nationwide on the A&E cable network, and through critically Philharmonic Orchestra, of which he was music director, and other recordings include an all-Sibelius album with acclaimed recordings on the Naxos American Classics series, and a new recording of Beethoven’s choral tour de the Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra and a recording of Samuel Barber’s First Symphony with the Milwaukee force Missa Solemnis. In 2002, the orchestra recorded its widely acclaimed CD featuring works by the American Symphony. Music Director of the latter ensemble from 1968 to 1980, he is credited with its development into one CARTER music icon Amy Beach. In this same year, the orchestra released a recording of Leonard Bernstein’s West Side of America’s major orchestras. He served as Assistant Conductor of the New York Philharmonic under Leonard Story and a recording of works by George Whitefield Chadwick. The orchestra has also recorded compact discs Bernstein, with whom he had studied at Tanglewood, where he won the coveted Koussevitzky Prize, and as Music devoted to the works of Howard Hanson and to those of Charles Ives, both of which have received high critical Director of the New Jersey Symphony. Prior to his engagement by the Milwaukee Symphony, Kenneth Symphony No. 1 • Piano Concerto acclaim from such prestigious publications as Gramophone, Absolute Sound, Stereophile, Billboard and The Schermerhorn was the Music Director of the American Ballet Theatre for eleven years, a post he resumed again Houston Chronicle. In addition to its highly successful recording endeavours, the Nashville Symphony’s East from 1982 until 1984. He directed the first performance of Mikhail Baryshnikov’s Nutcracker at the Kennedy Coast Tour and Carnegie Hall début in 2000, declared “youthful and fresh…a knockout” by The New York Times, Center in 1977 and his CBS recording of The Nutcracker with the London Philharmonic Orchestra is the Mark Wait, Piano have helped solidify the Symphony’s position as one of the nation’s leading orchestras. soundtrack for the network’s annual telecast of the ballet. A frequent and highly sought after opera conductor, he led the gala celebration of the Metropolitan Opera’s Centennial in 1983, broadcast worldwide, and has also conducted the opera companies of San Francisco, San Diego, Edmonton, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, San Antonio, Nashville Symphony Orchestra • Kenneth Schermerhorn Milwaukee, and Nashville. He is the recipient of the Sibelius medal from the Finnish Government and as a composer has written over fifty choral, orchestral, and chamber works. 8.559151 5 6 8.559151 559151bk Carter USA 17/12/2003 08:42 pm Page 2 Elliott Carter (b. 1908) of the judges), the overture was instead first performed on his 85th birthday, was composed a full generation the Concerto begins and ends with unaccompanied Carter’s earlier music, but it’s ultimately still heroic. in Frankfurt under Celibidache, conducting musicians after the Symphony and the Holiday Overture. Though piano. In the first movement, the concertino group Though one of Carter’s most astringent scores, when Holiday Overture • Symphony No. 1 • Piano Concerto reading from parts photostatted by Carter, who in the earliest of his solo concertos, it is in many ways the engages in dialogue with the piano with occasional heard in the context of his earlier, more approachable While no one will ever agree on who is the most rather than traditional development, chamber music frustration, smuggled the originals out of the least concerto-like. By the mid 1960s, Carter had intrusions from the orchestra which remains mostly works, the Concerto can be heard in a new light. Like important living American composer, Elliott Carter is approaches to orchestration where the orchestra’s many Symphony’s library after many months of waiting in already built the foundations of a brand new music subdued. In the second movement, the orchestra his earlier music, it brims with relentless energy. often called the most eminent, which is difficult to voices often function as individuals, a love of elaborate vain for the première. Carter revised the score in 1961, through chamber works where different musical strands explodes in a brutal sonic assault eventually Behind the web of layers, lurks a powerful and deeply dispute. Now 95 years old and actively composing for polyphony engendered at least in part from and the Boston Symphony later on more than made up were presented simultaneously for the sake of disappearing, leaving only the piano and the concertino moving tour-de-force. eight decades, Carter spans nearly the entire twentieth compositional studies in Paris with the great French for their negligence by commissioning and giving the contrasting rather than blending, where differences group, with the piano alone quietly having the last century and the beginning of the 21st. Famous for pedagogue Nadia Boulanger, and music that no matter first performance of the Piano Concerto. between instrumental lines became more emphasized word. It is the opposite of the glorious fanfares in Frank J. Oteri highly demanding atonal scores using extraordinarily how rigorous is not afraid of occasionally being Though completed in Santa Fe in December 1942, than similarities. Carter was eager to expand this idea to sophisticated rhythms, Carter is a prime architect of humorous. Many of Carter’s compositional devices also parts of Symphony No. 1 date to the mid-1930s and were orchestral music but the orchestra’s institutional nature Frank J. Oteri is a New York-based composer and the Editor of NewMusicBox, the Web magazine from the modernist music in the United States. Among his most hark back to Carter’s boyhood mentor Charles Ives, originally part of the early ballet score Pocahontas, greatly discouraged his experimentation. American Music Center (www.newmusicbox.org). important works are: the Double Concerto for Piano whose maverick works no matter how complicated among the earliest music by Carter that he still Between the Holiday Overture and the Piano and Harpsichord with Two Chamber Orchestras, which always had a direct impact. acknowledges. Other parts of the symphony, such as Concerto, Carter composed few orchestral works, a Stravinsky hailed as a masterpiece, a Concerto for The Holiday Overture was composed on Fire Island lush string chords opening the first movement, date to ballet, The Minotaur; the Elegy for Strings, Orchestra which Bernstein championed, a Grammy- (NY) during the summer of 1944 and reflects the the work’s revision in 1954 after Carter’s music had orchestrating a chamber piece, the Variations for winning Violin Concerto, and five string quartets, often general uplifting spirit of most American concert music already undergone a radical transformation. Although Orchestra which employed a dissonant harmonic Mark Wait hailed as the most important works in the genre since composed then. France’s liberation, while especially called Symphony No. 1, to date there has never been a language but with relatively straight-forward rhythms Mark Wait is Dean and Professor of Music at the Blair Bartók, two of which were awarded Pulitzers. His most meaningful for Carter who spent three years in Paris, Symphony No. 2. “Symphony” appears in only two and orchestration, and the revolutionary Double School of Music at Vanderbilt University, Tennessee. As recent compositions include his first opera, What Next?, was a decisive American victory and an early harbinger other Carter titles: A Symphony of Three Orchestras Concerto which completely revamped the way a pianist, he has been active in presenting and promoting and a Cello Concerto for Yo-Yo Ma. of the Allied triumph ending World War Two the (1977), and his recent orchestral triptych, Symphonia: orchestra members were distributed as well as how they contemporary music. In 1989 he was the pianist in a The three orchestral works presented here span only following year. A triumphant attitude permeates the sum fluxae pretium spei (1993-96). Compared with interacted with one another, resulting in music that performance at Alice Tully Hall of Elliott Carter’s two decades, a seemingly insignificant time frame overture, perhaps Carter’s most bravado music. Yet, these massive works, Symphony No. 1 is much humbler. more closely resembles a large scale chamber work than Double Concerto for Piano, Harpsichord, and Two considering Carter’s longevity, but the Holiday even though it sounds almost antithetical to the Scored for a small orchestra and employing mostly an orchestral piece. The Piano Concerto refines the Chamber Orchestras, conducted by Robert Craft. His Overture and Symphony No. 1, both composed in the introspective multi-layerings he would embark on only diatonic harmonic vocabulary, it also sounds far approach initiated in the Double Concerto.

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