Violin Concerto - Elliott Carter

Odense Symphony Orchestra conducted by Justin Brown. Rolf Schulte as the violinist.

I - Impulsivo - (attacca): 0:00
II - Angosciato (violin) / Tranquillo (orchestra): 10:19
III - Scherzando: 19:37

Carter's Violin Concerto was finished in 1990, being a commission from the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra and Norwegian violinist Ole Bøhn. It was premiered on May 2 of that year, with conductor Herbert Blomstedt leading Bøhn and the San Francisco Symphony. The piece won the 1994 Grammy Award for Best Classical Contemporary Composition.

However, the rather poor performance made Carter doubt about the quality of the work, something which would dissapear with the following performance with the London Sinfonietta conducted by Oliver Knussen. The work is, rather classically, divided in three movements in a fast-slow-fast scheme, all of them played without stop. The work was written in the last phase of Carter’s compositional career. In this late period (from the 1980s to his death in 2012), the degree of complexity in Carter’s music is significantly reduced in regards to rhythm and the density of his multi-layered textures.

Bayan Northcott, placed it in the tradition of "lyric" violin concertos, such as Mendelssohn's famous work. He contrasts this style of concerto to the "symphonic" concerto where the violin "is treated as an obbligato". As in the Mendelssohn-type concertos, the violin plays from the start and exposes all the important material first before handing it off to the orchestra. But viewed from another perspective, this is a highly symphonic-style concerto. Development of material and weightiness of idea are important to the concerto's concept, an argument for the symphonic nature of the music. The opening violin lines are, in fact, hidden. Its figurations are echoed by a dense web of similar lines being played all over the orchestra. These actually hide the violin's sound: a live audience can see the soloist playing, but rarely pick out any notes.

Perhaps this satisfies Carter's penchant for writing dense music that moves on many layers at once. But at any rate, the first movement quickly thins out in texture so the violin can take the lead. In general, the violin proposes short ideas that the orchestra picks up in short, cinematic cross cuts. The second movement gives itself entirely to one of Carter's typical multilevel ideas. Here, the violin is pitted against the orchestra as decisively as in any concerto: the movement has two tempo marks, the violin part is marked Angosciato, but the orchestra is marked Tranquillo. The soloist plays short, bothered phrases, while the orchestra unrolls in slow waves of sound. The finale has a dancing part that keeps getting disconnected from the orchestra. After a cadenza, the orchestra plays what sounds like final chords, but the violin still dances on for a few measures, with a few orchestral strings scattering before it in a fade out.

I couldn't find the source of the picture.

Source: https://bit.ly/3D2yrPl

Unfortunately the score is not available.