Get Carter

Contemporary music from the nonogenarian American composer Elliott Carter. The disk contains his Clarinet Concerto and Symphonia: Sum Fluxae Pretium Spei. Played by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Oliver Knussen with Michael Collins the clarinet soloist. I sometimes question the enjoyment and satisfaction that I get from such music but am prepared to remain open minded and can see the worth that is clearly there. I do wonder though when and if there will be any change in direction since "new music" has been ploughing similar furrows for over fifty years now. As Knussen's sleeve notes say, these works are erected on a scaffolding of giant polyrhythms, two pendulums that start together and drift further and further apart triggering musical incidents as they proceed. My layman's take on it is that the music is forever in a kind of stasis, it seems to start, is there and then finishes without any sense of a journey or progression. If it were programmatic, the visual picture it would conjure up would be of some kind of primordial soup of drifting gas and dust clouds. Not altogether unpleasant though !