Search - Elliott Carter, Ursula Oppens, Arditti String Quartet :: Carter: Chamber Music (5th String Quartet, 90+ for Piano, Sonata for Cello and Piano, Figment for Cello Alone, Duo for Violin and Piano, Fragment for String Quartet)

Carter: Chamber Music (5th String Quartet, 90+ for Piano, Sonata for Cello and Piano, Figment for Cello Alone, Duo for Violin and Piano, Fragment for String Quartet)
Elliott Carter, Ursula Oppens, Arditti String Quartet
Carter: Chamber Music (5th String Quartet, 90+ for Piano, Sonata for Cello and Piano, Figment for Cello Alone, Duo for Violin and Piano, Fragment for String Quartet)
Genre: Classical
 
  •  Track Listings (20) - Disc #1

In his 90th year, Elliott Carter is doing something few nonagenarians ever do: he's premiering a striking new string quartet, his fifth. And it's an awe-inspiring piece. The Arditti String Quartet takes up the short phrase...  more »

     
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Amazon.com essential recording
In his 90th year, Elliott Carter is doing something few nonagenarians ever do: he's premiering a striking new string quartet, his fifth. And it's an awe-inspiring piece. The Arditti String Quartet takes up the short phrases that run with and then against one another with sureness, plucking and scraping and making their bows sing. They then delve into each of the five interludes that interrogate the quartet's six sections and play through the disparate splinters of tone and flushes of midrange color as if they were perfectly logical developments. Which they're not. Carter has again brilliantly scripted a chatter of stringed voices--à la the second quartet--that converse quickly, sometimes mournfully, but never straightforwardly. This complexity of conversation is a constant for Carter, coming sharply to light in "90+" and then in Rohan de Saram and Ursula Oppens's heaving read of the 1948 Sonata for Cello and Piano, as well as in virtually all these pieces. This is a monumental recording, extending the documented work of a lamentably underappreciated American composer. --Andrew Bartlett
 

CD Reviews

Oppens and the Arditti do this music like no one else.
Jacob Greenberg | Chicago, IL | 12/23/1998
(5 out of 5 stars)

"Ursula Oppens' legendary status as an interpreter of the thorniest American piano repertoire is more than justified in this disk. Both she and the phenomenal Arditti quartet succeed in communicating the beauty in Carter's recent and not so recent works alike; the Fifth Quartet and "90+" seem at least as accessible as earlier pieces like the cello sonata (played here with an electrifying rhythmic intensity by Oppens and Rohan de Saram). Pieces like the 1994 Fragment for string quartet and the Violin and Piano Duo also emerge with a genuine emotional impact. Rarely has this music sounded more lucid to me. I recommend the disk without reservation, and I eagerly anticipate the group's new disk of the (newly composed) Carter Piano Quintet."