Very little of today’s new music sounds as new as Elliott Carter’s Piano Concerto, written 32 years ago. This is one of the composer’s knottiest, most uncompromising scores, a 23-minute workout for piano and large orchestra that carries intellectual complexity and technical virtuosity about as far as post-tonal composition will allow. Even at that, the unsuspecting listener coming upon this music for the first time is likely to find much of it tough to penetrate.
But Carter’s mature works usually repay the effort made to grapple with their densities of thought and gesture. To judge from their attentiveness, Wednesday’s Chicago Symphony Orchestra audience was willing to do so. This had everything to do with the quality of the performance by soloist Ursula Oppens and guest conductor Michael Gielen. Carter, who joined them on stage to share in the applause at the end, could not have asked for finer, more sympathetic climbers to scale his Everest of a concerto.
Most Romantic concertos are contests pitting soloist against orchestra, with the soloist eventually emerging in triumph. Carter treats them as bitter antagonists that draw further apart as the two movements progress. The pianist wages a grim fight for her identity, tearing through thickets of splintery dissonances as the orchestra attempts to engulf and silence her.
A concertino group of seven woodwinds and strings attempts to mediate between the soloist and the monolithic orchestra, without much success. Musical events race past in a blur, like elements of an alien landscape viewed from a speeding car.
Since 1965, when Carter completed the concerto, music has spun off in other directions, and so, in fact, has Carter’s music, always maintaining its intellectual rigor. A generation of American composers has sprung up, many of whom have rejected Carter’s gospel for the very reasons that his fellow modernists embraced it. All this does not devalue a brilliantly constructed piece or Wednesday’s powerfully committed reading.
Oppens, that most intelligent and protean of today’s pianists, is among the very few who can not only vanquish the music’s knuckle-busting difficulties but make sense of the implied drama taking place around them. She and Gielen recorded the concerto roughly a decade ago, but the orchestral execution on this occasion was altogether more precise, muscular, confident.
The second and third “Leonore” overtures served as Beethovenian bookends for the concerto. Gielen’s firm and vigilant shaping of detail within clearly defined structures made each work a blazing precis of the opera, not least the seldom performed “Leonore” No. 2. Graceful woodwind playing heightened the genial melodic charm of four excerpts from Schubert’s “Rosamunde” incidental music.
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The program will be repeated at 8 p.m. Thursday and Saturday and 1:30 p.m. Friday.
