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4.0 out of 5 stars
Not ideal performances, but still good, Dec 4 2003
This early-1990s recording from the London Sinfonietta under Oliver Knussen was the one that introduced the Violin Concerto and the Three Occasions to the record catalogue, as well as reintroducing the Concerto for Orchestra. This recording of the Violin Concerto remains the only one of that piece, but there are now more rivals for the other pieces.The Three Occasions for Orchestra are three short pieces, assembled piecemeal over the late 1980s. A Celebration of some 100 x 150 Notes is a highly complex fanfare; Remembrance an elegy with a prominent part for solo trombone; Anniversary a delightful essay in atonal melody, the melodic lines always ascending. Those who have heard Carter's 1990s masterpiece Symphonia may note that in some ways the Occasions feel rather like a study for the later piece. This is a good performance, and comparable to Gielen's rival recording on Arte Nova. The Violin Concerto will, for many Carter fans, be the prime reason to get hold of this disc. It's very much a piece of 1990s Carter, in as much as that the writing is much less complex than in earlier music, and more melodic. Indeed, this is the first of Carter's concerti to explicitly follow the historical concerto model--fast first movement, slow second and a light-hearted finale. Being Carter, of course, the model isn't followed exactly (even if the violin soloist barely has a bar of rest through the work) but nonetheless this could in some ways be considered a late-20th century analogue of, say, the Schoenberg concerto. I don't personally find it as compelling as Carter's best works; even with a good solo performance from the concerto's dedicatee Ole Bohn, it strikes me as rather less ambitious than, say, Symphonia or the Piano Concerto. The Concerto for Orchestra, however, is a bona fide Carter classic. One of the most complex works Carter ever wrote, it's based on St John Perse's poem Vents, in which destructive winds destroy and then renew America. It's in four movements with a prologue and epilogue, all played without a break (usefully tracked separately here, unlike in rival performances); the first movement dominated by the tenor region, the second the treble, the third the bass and the finale the alto. (Of course, being Carter, the music that dominates each movement is going on all the time, constantly transforming itself--it's just that each of these four loci of musical argument come to the forefront in the appropriate movement.) This is a very difficult work to bring off, and despite the formidable technical abilities of Knussen and the London Sinfonietta, I found Michael Gielen's broader, more expansive rendition on Arte Nova more convincing. (It's also a lot cheaper.) Nonetheless, this disc won't disappoint Carter fans, who will certainly want to hear the Violin Concerto. Those new to the composer might want to try a more accessible introduction first (Carter's music is notoriously difficult to get into, though extremely rewarding). For such listeners, I'd recommend either the Nonesuch disc with the Cello Sonata and Double Concerto, or possibly the DG disc with Symphonia.
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