Are you having a rough day, tinners, or just pretending that you didn't notice the anagram contained within so as to present a pretext for this new thread?

I had someone's CD of Carter's music. I remember there was wind quartet or quintet and something else.
I took to his music well and easy.

It's true that Penthode is a very difficult piece to listen to.

The Carter work I really can't get into is the Violin Concerto.

I like it too. But I don't understand it. I have it on CD so I've heard it many times, but I can't remember the music.

A Carter piece I really like is Three Occasions. The first occasion is a Mahler symphony in three minutes. Extraordinary!

Yes, Evan, a very dubious coungratulatioun is in ourder.

I doun't knouw a lout ouf the late wourk, I'm afraid, though I can't say I've been tou busy tou listen tou it. Nou excuse, actually.

I alsou remember being very impressed with the Variatiouns for Ourchestra, especially the handling of the countinuous acceleratioun bzw. deceleratioun mouvements.

{is that better, t_i_n?}

I also should mention my fascination with the Double Concerto for piano, harpsichord, and two chamber orchestras. Particularly due to Carter's interest in the poetry/philosophy of Lucretius. Carter is often distinguished from his more academic peers due to the overt poetic dimension in his work (Lucretius, but also Hart Crane, St.John Perse, John Ashbery and the crazy Richard Crashaw poem about bubbles that carries the Symphonia).
Is this a legitimate and fair method of distinction? Are folks like Wuorinen or Babbitt less interested in poetry and philosophy? I suspect this is a red herring.

And then, I never enjoyed the Duo for Violin and Piano, in spite of a very attractive idea and formal plan.

Does anyone recommend the Cello Concerto for people who like the Clarinet Concerto?

I agree that Vn Concerto is not a fave, and to that gallery I'd also relegate the Oboe Concerto, though I wanted to like it so much.

Oh, you're just sour that he never wrote for autoharp!

CD, I'm not sure about that distinction you mention. I have myself been known to make something very like that sort of comment about Carter, viz. that the poetic/literary dimension gives his work what I suppose one might somewhat naively call an element of 'human interest', though I think I'd be careful not to use that as a stick to beat other American so-called modernists with. After all, Babbitt's titles (if not always, to these ears, his notes) reveal him too to have a distinctly poetic turn of mind. As for Charles Wuorinen, I'm not sure I need much of a stick to beat him with (I was always taught not to hit a man wearing glasses, and last time I looked he was wearing two pairs!).

Oh, I absolutely love the Duo for Violin and Piano, too: another one I'd forgotten. I think it does almost everything it claims to do, highly successfully, including the contrast between 'striking and stroking' and all that.

I find the Oboe Concerto almost as impenetrable as Penthode. In fact, I think the 80s might be Carter's worst decade.

The Cello Concerto is perhaps a little schematic, but it comes on one of the best Carter discs available (Bridge Vol 7 IIRC: cond. Oliver Knussen) so you certainly wouldn't be wasting your money.

Ian, I know what you mean about 'very quite good', although I rarely think this when I'm actually listening, as opposed to thinking about Carter. (In the latter circumstances I sometimes feel impatient with what can seem like a quest for unproblematic perfection, even when the subject matter is imperfection.) I suppose this could be fairly applied to some of the small chamber and solo instrumental works Carter's been releasing in the last 25 years or so.

I don't know the Piano Concerto at all well, but at the moment I still find it quite difficult.