Symphonia: "Sum fluxae pretium spei" - Elliott Carter

BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Oliver Knussen.

I - Partita: 0:00
II - Adagio tenebroso: 16:26
III - Allegro scorrevolle: 33:52

Carter's Symphonia was composed between 1993-6, each movement being written as self-sufficient works. It was premiered as a whole on April 25 of 1998, performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Oliver Knussen. The second movement was a finalist for the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Music, and the third won The Prince Pierre of Monaco Music Composition Prize in 1998.

The piece is the largest orchestral work of the composer, firmly anchored in the dissonant, hard-edged, atonal style characterized by the metric modulation. Elliott Carter adapted Charles Ives' idea of polytempo: music unfolding at different speeds in different sections of the ensemble. The overall inspiration, and the source of the inspiration of each of the movements, is a Latin-language poem by the English writer Richard Crashaw. The poem is called "Bulla" (The Bubble), an hymn to the transitory joys and tragedies of life, imagined from the perspective of — or rather, through the multi-coloured prism of — a bubble. The subtitle of the work, rendered into English, is "I am the prize of flowing hope."

The first movement was commissioned by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, which premiered the work under the conductor Daniel Barenboim on February 17 of 1994. It was inspired by the passage: "[I am]...the star of the sea, as it were, the golden wit of nature, the rambling tale of nature, the brief dream of nature". Carter uses the name "partita" not for its Baroque association but in the sense of "game" found in the Italian language. It plays with shifting, crossing lines of various tempos. An especially important sound is a kind of ringing chord that gets thrown around the orchestra. The music is explosive, with some solo voices occasionally emerging. But mostly it is an ever-shifting, never-repeated structure of bursts of sound.

The second movement was commissioned by the BBC to celebrate the 100th anniversary of The Proms, being premiered on September 13 of 1995, performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sir Andrew Davis. It is as dark as its title suggests. Its poetic epigram is "I am the glass of the blind goddess". In this brooding, desolate movement, chords and fragments of musical ideas cross slowly, with only one major eruption of full orchestral power, a terrifying passage.

The third movement was commissioned by the Cleveland Orchestra, first performed on May 22 of 1997, performed by the Cleveland Orchestra directed by Christoph von Dohnányi. Following the poetic subtitle (I am the brief nature of the wind. To be sure, I am the flower of air), it is light, with sparkling bursts of sound — as complex as the first movement, but not aggressive in feeling. At the end, however, the music suddenly plunges to the lowest register, leaving only a high piccolo — the bubble has burst.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/2djdpf9a

Unfortunately, the score is not freely available.