It's not often that anyone gets to salute a major composer's centenary while he's still there to appreciate it. That Elliott Carter's 100th birthday this week didn't get so much as a nod from any of the Bay Area's many orchestras is understandable, if disappointing. But San Francisco Performances stepped into the breach with a weekend's worth of Carter at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, covering nearly the whole of the man's still-active career.
Between Saturday's documentary film, panel discussion, and Robert Greenberg lecture and Sunday's survey of the piano music by Ursula Oppens came one of the more staggering feats of chamber-music playing I've ever seen: the Pacifica Quartet playing all five Carter string quartets within the space of three hours.
Pacifica Quartet
The Pacificas, whose recording of the First and Fifth Quartets on Naxos 8.559362 was released this year — a disc containing the other three quartets is due out in 2009 — have taken this show on the road, so to speak. (One friend of mine at the concert had heard them play the cycle four times before.) How the Pacifica players — violinists Simin Ganatra and Sibbi Bernhardsson, violist Masumi Per Rostad, and cellist Brandon Vamos — muster the stamina to do this even once, I don't know. On Saturday they did it with the sort of comfortable familiarity that other quartets project in Mozart, and painted, for me, an entirely new portrait of Carter.
Once before now I've sat down to an evening of the complete Carter string quartets. There were some differences, though. The players were the Arditti Quartet. I was an eager, young, quartet-loving violinist on a year of study abroad, in London. Also, it was then merely (merely!) Carter's 80th birthday, so the “complete” quartets numbered only four.
I was irritated by the pair of — as I thought then — transparent poseurs sitting just behind me, study scores in hand, who exclaimed to each other in the intervals between pieces about how “beautiful” and “expressive” the music was. And I was furious at Carter in a way I'd never felt about any composer before.
Once Bewildering
The First Quartet, though it bewildered me completely, contained things I could hold on to — the dazzling scorrevole scherzo passages, the eerie violin duets in the slow movement, the bare mechanics of its many tempo modulations — and seeing it played with the Ardittis' uncanny confidence was fascinating in itself. In the Second, though, the players seemed to me to be actively working to destroy any sense of shared purpose; and the Third, with half the quartet on one side of the stage and half on the other, one duo playing four movements while the other played six, struck me like an act of malicious vandalism.
When the Ardittis returned after a break to play the Fourth, the quartet was sitting together again, but I could make nothing of the music except that it seemed very long, very dense, and gratuitously ugly. I was a young quartet-playing nut at the time, passionate about Haydn in particular and transfixed by a vision of individuals remaining individual, but acting so as to produce harmony. It seemed to me that night that Carter was doing his strenuous utmost to rip that ideal to shreds.
Since that time, I've heard a lot of Carter (and an awful lot of string quartets), but apart from a Composers Quartet performance of the Fourth somewhere in the early 1990s that did nothing for my opinion of the piece, I've stayed well away from the Carter quartets. So I went to the Pacifica Quartet's minimarathon Saturday feeling unsure exactly what I would find.
Well, I left the Pacificas' recital understanding why I felt as I did, but no longer agreeing with it. The quartets — especially the gnarled middle ones — are still fantastically complex, forbiddingly involuted music; but the purpose behind them isn't at all what I'd thought.
The First (1951), much the longest, is still the easiest to follow; 20 years' distance hasn't changed that. The daunting thing about Carter's quartet textures is that often no instrument seems to speak the same thing more than once, and seldom do all four players appear to agree on anything, even what they're discussing. But in the First there are passages of more “normal” quartet-writing, where the material or the alliances in the ensemble, or both, stay the same for longish stretches.
That big slow section is a thing so arresting that you can't help but still your breathing listening to it. The two violins, muted, play a series of long, quiet notes, starting in the high register but eventually covering the instruments' entire range. Viola and cello, in loose alliance, break in fiercely from time to time, but the sweet, slow violin duo always resumes without wavering. Finally it breaks apart of its own accord, and a sudden stream of rapid notes cascades down as though we'd reached the melting edge of a vast glacier. The only thing remotely like it I can think of is Ives' Unanswered Question, yet here there's no “question,” and the slow, still music isn't remote, but rather frightfully human and precarious.
The First's other handhold is the device generally called “metric modulation,” which I think is all over the quartets but much the baldest in this one. The basic idea is that you can move from one tempo to another by making the old beat and the new one both equal to multiples of some much-shorter pulse going on all the time. You have a stream of running fast notes, let us say, and four of them fit into one beat in the old tempo; shift to counting them by threes instead of fours, and suddenly you have a new (shorter) beat and a new (faster) tempo. It's like shifting gears on a bicycle — one revolution of the pedals suddenly takes you a different distance on the pavement.
In the First Quartet, Carter tends to mark these shifts by having some instrument play regularly on the beat in the new tempo for a while, so you can follow the whole process. Besides making the gear-shift obvious, these markers have a character of their own, sort of a demented walking bass. (One passage near the end of the second movement gets positively funky.)
Free-for-All
The succeeding quartets are shorter, but harder to grasp. The conceit of the Second (1959) is that each instrument is assigned a character and a kind of melodic material, and each in turn dominates a section of the piece. Since they all stay “in character” throughout, even when they aren't dominant, the ruling texture is a kind of rhythmic and harmonic free-for-all. But it is never chaos; the players are ceaselessly reacting to one another, in ways that the Pacificas' alert, yet almost casual, playing made vivid.
The same went for the Third Quartet (1971), the one that on paper looks like a dramatic depiction of a particularly ugly divorce. The duos — first violin and cello on one side, second and viola on the other — may be playing different material, in different styles, with different pauses between sections, but for all that they're audibly and visibly communicating with each other. Carter stretches the cords connecting the players unmercifully, but he doesn't snap them.
I wonder if this seemed clearer because the Pacificas played the piece without technical aids. My understanding was that after early performers proved unable to coordinate the duos without a click track, the click track has become standard equipment for the piece. The Pacificas did without. (They thereby avoided, among other things, the technical glitches of that long-ago Arditti performance, where the click tracks kept malfunctioning and the piece eventually started for good about 15 minutes late. To be fair to the Ardittis, though, their duos were seriously separated, by maybe 20 feet, while the Pacificas' were more like 10 feet apart.)
Despite the First Quartet's grueling length and the Third's horrific difficulties of coordination, the Fourth (1985) must beyond question be the nastiest to play. The stagehands had symbolically moved the stands and chairs a bit further apart for the Second and then raised and further separated the stands for the Third, which all but cellist Vamos played standing up (a couple of extra chairs were left for players to stow their bows on for the more frantic pizzicato sections). For the Fourth everything was, externally speaking, back in cozy quartet-form, though cozy the piece is not.
Sounds to the Max
It's as though Carter, reverting to something more like a unified quartet texture, felt the need to reinforce the thing's solidity with as much sound as possible. The playing is cruelly continuous, the relentless double-stopping punishingly difficult — all the more so because most of these aren't double-stops you can hit and release, but notes of substantial length that you are, practically speaking, obliged to hold just as you hit them, whether you landed accurately or not. Pacifica first violinist Ganatra is a phenomenally accurate player, but not literally infallible, and she found herself in some sticky situations here Saturday. So did her colleagues.
All the same, the Pacificas' understanding of the music, their intimate knowledge of it, made it for the first time something I would look forward to hearing again. They played here, as throughout the recital, with the sort of rhythmic confidence that you rarely see in music this difficult, even at the top level. Everyone knew, not only where his own next gesture fell, but also where to expect everyone else's, and the interplay at its most furious had almost the ease of banter, as though they could not merely speak their lines, but could choose in the instant to add a fresh inflection to them. Not for the first time in the evening, I was astonished at the amount of sheer wit the performers saw in Carter.
And by the time we reached the Fifth Quartet (1995), it was clear that they weren't imagining it. Following on the heels of the Fourth, the piece brought with its air of lightness, relaxation, and capriciousness an almost physical relief. At the same time, though, you could see how it was possible for Carter to get from point A to point B, how the seeds of that leggerezza pensosa (“thoughtful lightness,” to borrow from the title of another Carter work of the 1990s) are there in music that wears quite another public face.
I can't put into words my admiration for the Pacifica Quartet's achievement in presenting all this music not only with such dedication and skill (they're not alone there) but with such joy, grace, and humor. How great it would be if Carter were to write a Sixth Quartet for these young hotshots. If anyone has earned such an honor, they have.
Michelle Dulak Thomson is a violinist and violist who has written about music for Strings, Stagebill, Early Music America, and The New York Times.
