Volume 56, Number 4 · March 12, 2009
Happy Birthday, Elliott Carter!
By Charles Rosen
Elliott Carter: A Centennial Portrait in Letters and Documents
by Felix Meyer and Anne C. Shreffler
Boydell Press, 367 pp., $47.95
Turning one hundred years old on December 11, 2008, Elliott Carter must have found the experience exhilarating and rejuvenating. When I went to see him on the afternoon of his birthday, he was hard at work on a song cycle for soprano and clarinet on poems by Louis Zukofsky. He looked younger than six months before—in fact, younger than six years before. That night, the Boston Symphony directed by James Levine played a new work of his, Interventions for piano and orchestra, with Daniel Barenboim as soloist. A few days later, a party of a dozen of his friends heard four of the new songs splendidly performed by Lucy Shelton and Charles Neidich; they are among his most lyrical and wittiest inspirations.
Review, 4118 words
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