I should hope so, given that that recording is reputed to have been stitched together from something like 300 takes!

Thanks for the link. Er, I can certainly see it, but it's so quiet I can't really hear it. Only three and a half months to wait then. That concert at the Barbican looks like it could be an interesting programme all round, if whoever's in charge can make their mind up about what's in it.

In recent months I have listened more to Carter again after I had cooled off from the composer, in particular from his later works, for several years. I have come to appreciate his music as far more involving than it mostly had seemed to me, with the exception of a few works like the 2nd and 3rd string quartets and the Concerto for Orchestra, which to me were “red-hot” Carter, an attribute that until recently I would have given no later Carter work.
 
The “problem” with Carter is that his modernist style was so radical and new when it broke through that inevitably it had to elicit associations with the “avant-garde” concept very much alive at the time (I am apparently not the only one who perceived it that way). Yet Carter then simply held onto it, with some variation but without radical further transformations that would have him kept at the forefront of avantgarde: his modernism became “traditionalist modernism”, as it were. Certainly, the avant-garde promise, which involves constant future change, is hard to keep – only a few composers can do it. So ultimately you cannot always expect too much, yet even with this in mind, Carter’s style simply seemed too resistant to further fundamental change. However, apparently for Carter it was never about avant-garde but simply about acquiring a personal style. This is an insight that is not readily open to everyone and certainly has not been open to me for a long time, but I think it is an insight essential to the appreciation of his wider output. I was, as it were, “blinded by the light” of the avantgarde promise that seemed to be there in the 50s and 60s, and only once I stopped being blinded by this light I could see the rich palette of shadows, i.e. the variation in his output.

The Symphonia is a much more different work than the Concerto for Orchestra than I ever had realized, and with its many innovations, which I did not notice before, it is perhaps not so much “traditionalist modernism” after all. A radical shift of view after I had listened to the work many times and even had experienced it live in late 2004 with the BSO under James Levine in Boston.

Not that I had not invested in Carter quite a bit. Apart from frequent listening to CDs and the live Symphonia, I had also experienced the world premiere of the Cello Concerto (October 2001, in NYC, with Yo-Yo Ma and the Chicago Symphony) and the world premiere of the Boston Concerto in 2002 in, of course, Boston.

The Cello Concerto had not left a lasting impression, except that the complex flurries had given way to short orchestral interruptions – not convincing at the time; it reminded me of the sparseness of late Schnittke, but without the incisive effect. A major problem had been that we sat way up high in Carnegie hall, far removed from the stage. You couldn’t hear much at all, or at least, until it finally reached us listeners, the sound did not have the strength to make a powerful impression – sometimes listening to a CD is better than live indeed.

The Boston Concerto seemed quite pleasant upon hearing it at the world premiere, with a nice return of the flurries but at the same time more of the same old Carter. Ultimately not too interesting.

About a year ago I listened again to the Cello Concerto, this time on the Bridge CD, and it seemed just pointless noodling at that time. The Boston Concerto seemed Carter Light – the composer as a playful shadow of his former, weightier self.

Recently, however, I have discovered that the Boston Concerto is a fantastic work. The way the game question-answer between instrumental groups in the faster passages creates tight, yet kaleidoscopically colorful textures, is amazing. The slow passages are of great strength; the woodwind harmonies in track 3 and the brass harmonies in track 9 of the Bridge CD are beautiful. The constant switch between fast and slow passages, dividing the music into many varied sections, gives an impression of “lots of music per minute” in this work. Perhaps this more recent music is red-hot Carter after all.

Even though the Cello Concerto is still a bit dry for me, I have been warming up to it more and more.

The Dialogues are terrific as well, with beautiful gestural correspondence – indeed dialogue – between piano and orchestra.

In my most recent listenings to the Symphonia it was the first time that I did not just admire the music, but truly enjoyed it. The density of the first movement and the fast “tossing the ball” between instrumental groups is exhilarating. The dark Adagio features a high level of harmonic sophistication in its very controlled interplay between dissonant chords and ones that are less so. The climax, devastating as it is, is actually a brief return to the playfulness of the first movement, but then in a grossly and painfully distorted, slowed-down manner. The attraction of the Finale does not just consist in the simultaneous playing of fast strands of flurry-like activity against slower moving music, but also in the morphing of these two kinds of music into one another.