Even in the world of hardline musical modernism there is room for sentimentality. As the first concert in the BBC’s Elliott Carter weekend ended, all eyes swivelled to the tiny 97-year-old New Yorker in the stalls. Would he or wouldn’t he?
In retrospect the answer was obvious. A composer who has survived more than half a century of indifference, incomprehension or hostility isn’t likely to spurn a great outburst of public acclaim when it is offered. So Carter slowly but surely shuffled onto the platform. And the audience (a good sized one, too) stood and cheered him every inch of the way. For a man who has never swerved from his convictions, never cut his cloth according to other people’s fashions, never sweetened his brew to win easy plaudits, this must have been a good moment.
Especially since it came straight after his dark and pathologically abrasive 1965 Piano Concerto, a work that seems not just to evoke but to exalt the stubborn resolve of a visionary artist battling through a world in which nearly everyone else is going the other way. Besides being a work that requires near superhuman concentration, strength and dexterity from the soloist — here the superb Nicolas Hodges — it also has one of the most dramatic formats of any concerto.
The pianist, splattering notes around like a frantic prisoner scrabbling for chinks in a wall, is not so much at odds with the orchestra (the BBC Symphony, expertly directed by Oliver Knussen) as on another planet. There is no dialogue, only confrontation and non-comprehension. Perhaps it’s significant that the work was written in Berlin during the Cold War.
However, the pianist is given a few kindred spirits with which to engage: seven other solo instrumentalists who surround him like bodyguards. And sometimes they too are emboldened to launch into expressive cadenzas, especially in the second of the work’s two movements, where the orchestra is often quelled into making only impotent peeps and whimpers.
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The ending seems optimistic. The orchestra makes one last cataclysmic effort to overwhelm or to coerce the pianist. An ominously swelling string cluster leads to a huge outburst from brass and percussion that is punctuated by something even more chilling — total silence. Yet the soloist not only survives, but is given the last word.
None of this is comfortable listening, but it is gripping. The concert’s first half was rather the opposite. Carter’s Three Occasions for Orchestra (1986-9) are far less harsh in style, but also less focused and persuasive. And who knows what was going on in Aaron Copland’s complex psyche when he conceived Connotations for the opening of New York’s Lincoln Centre in 1962? Blaring, even baleful at climaxes, squally and spiky in mood, sour in harmony, it seems more like a churlish V-sign than a cheery wave at Kennedy’s America.