Elliott Carter: Best of the Best

In his 90th year, Carter (b. 1908) saw his fantastic fifth string quartet debuted by the Arditti String Quartet, and he prepared to premiere his first opera. Carter is the best link late-20th-century music has to Charles Ives. He's written works of Ives's grand scope and miniature details, as well as set modern poems to challenging musical contexts. Here are his essential recordings.

	Carter: The Four String Quartets / Juilliard String Quartet
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Amazon.com essential recording These quartets are Juilliard specialties, and anyone wanting to hear this music played with a near ideal combination of virtuosity and humanity need look no further. Carter's quartets are not for the musically faint of heart: they are uncompromisingly thorny, intricate pieces that require lots of intense, dedicated listening. Very few people doubt their seriousness--or even their claims to musical greatness--but just as few people enjoy listening to them. Perhaps this spectacular set will...Read more
	Carter: Piano Concerto, Variations for Orchestra
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Amazon.com essential recording The music of Elliott Carter is one of the best connections that New Music has to Ives and his generation, including Cowell and Nancarrow. Carter, as catholic in his spools of influences as was Ives, wrote many acclaimed chamber works before his Piano Concerto, played here by Ursula Oppens. But the concerto takes the full weight of the chamber works and sends them loudly and intricately to a higher level, with a more developed hugeness. The Variations for Orchestra are likewise powerful...Read more
	Carter: Eight Compositions / Group for Contemporary Music
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Amazon.com essential recording With a full orchestra, Elliott Carter can spread his wings with clangorous grandness. When he goes with a smaller unit, as he does here, he can also do wonderful things--expanding on his tonal and timbral studies with telescoped intensity. This generous 78-minute collection begins in 1993 with Charles Neidich unfurling Gra for the solo clarinet, a piece that rivals anything on the extraordinary Giacinto Scelsi's Complete Works for the Clarinet for breadth and investigative power. Carter, an...Read more
	Carter: The Vocal Works (1975-1981) / Speculum Musicae
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Amazon.com essential recording This reading of In Sleep, In Thunder has tenor Jon Garrison singing Carter's musical setting of six Robert Lowell poems. Speculum Musicae grasps the piece's broad-based low-end sweeps expertly, flanging when Garrison's voice seems to unlock and bellow. The music shudders as the tenor considers Lowell's lines, emphasizing the conflicted poetics with interjections that interrupt each other shatteringly. While the Lowell poems allow Carter a fairly costly emotional investigation of personality and...Read more