BBC - Symphony Orchestra - Carter Weekend

Sunday 15 January

11.00am Film, Cinema 1, Level -2
South Bank Show: Elliott Carter (*)
London Weekend Television's South Bank Show introduced the world of Elliott Carter to a mainstream television audience. It shows the Pulitzer Prize-winning Carter as an artist in tune with the complexities of modern American culture. It also explores the rise of his recognition and influence in Europe during the 1980s.
1986 Dir. Alan Benson, 54 mins
(*) certificate to be confirmed
Plus
Quintet for Piano & Strings
Award-winning director Frank Scheffer's combinations of sound and image have redefined the nature of films about music. He has followed and documented Elliott Carter's work for more than quarter of a century, gaining unique insights into the composer's artistic philosophy and character in the process.
2004 Dir. Frank Scheffer, 16 mins

2.00pm Concert, St Giles Cripplegate
Music for Piano

ELLIOTT CARTER Night Fantasies
IVES Some Southpaw Pitching
SCHOENBERG KLAVIERSTÜCKE Op 33a and 33b
DEBUSSY Études pour les sonoritiés opposées
ELLIOTT CARTER Piano Sonata

Rolf Hind piano

With its ever-shifting moods, Night Fantasies was instantly recognised as a towering work of the contemporary piano repertoire following its premiere at the 1980 Bath Festival. The work, programmed here alongside others concerned with musical timbre and texture, reflects what its composer describes as "the fleeting thoughts and feelings that pass through the mind during a period of wakefulness at night". Carter's two-movement Piano Sonata has become an iconic work of American music, forged in the heat of the composer's early explorations of chronological and psychological time.

4.30pm Concert, Guildhall School Music Hall
Early Carter

SCHOENBERG Five Pieces for Orchestra, Op 16
ELLIOTT CARTER The Minotaur
ELLIOTT CARTER Symphony No 1

Guildhall School Symphony Orchestra

The sheer diversity of Carter's output catches the ear and demands celebration, not least in his early works. While echoes of Stravinsky and Copland call out from the scores of The Minotaur and the First Symphony, both project deeply personal expressions of the composer's ideas on sound and rhythm. Originally conceived in partnership with choreographer George Balanchine, The Minotaur contains some of Carter's most lyrical, neo-classical writing. The pastoral First Symphony, first performed in 1944, has been compared with Copland's Appalachian Spring

7.00pm Talk, Barbican Hall
Elliott Carter in conversation with Christopher Cook.

7.30pm Freestage Event, Barbican Foyer
Guildhall School of Music & Drama
The performance of a new piece created by students from the Guildhall School of Music & Drama working alongside musicians from the BBCSO which takes the music of Elliott Carter as its starting point.
Free

8.00pm Concert, Barbican Hall
Orchestral Manoeuvres

BARTÓK Music for Strings, Percussion and Celeste
ELLIOTT CARTER Oboe Concerto
ELLIOTT CARTER A Symphony of Three Orchestras

BBC Symphony Orchestra
David Robertson conductor
Nicholas Daniel oboe

In a lecture given in 1953, Carter cited Stravinsky, Schoenberg and Bartók as composers who "have been continuously creative, not satisfied with finding some trademark, some mannerism which would stereotype their music". Much the same could be said of Carter's own lifetime achievement. The point is underlined in this evening's programme, eloquently unfolded in Bartók's compelling work and endorsed by Carter's mercurial Oboe Concerto and A Symphony of Three Orchestras, the latter inspired by the vivid, cinematic poetry of Hart Crane.

Get Carter! The Music of Elliott Carter