music

Elliott Carter festival at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

Delightful events as composer turns 100

San Francisco Performances finished its two-day Elliott Carter centennial celebration last Sunday, Dec. 7, with a concert of his piano works by Ursula Oppens, a mainstay of contemporary piano literature. She was in the Bay Area last year when Cal Performances held a Fredric Rzewski festival, where she played punishing piano duets with the composer.

Carter’s life and piano compositions were explicated beforehand by Robert Greenberg, who also spent three hours lecturing on Carter and his string quartets Saturday, before the evening concert where the Pacifica Quartet performed all five string quartets.

Last year Greenberg teamed up with the Alexander String Quartet for a lecture and concert comparing Carter to Haydn (Feb. 20 Piedmont Post), describing both composers as seeking the true voice within each instrument. Where Haydn creates a careful polyphony, a comradely give-and-take, Carter’s instruments speak all at once. And not only with individual voices but also with differing rhythms, signature keys…and musical styles!

Influenced by Stravinsky, Berg, Ives and Copland as well as jazz and American idioms, Carter went from polyphony to “poly” musical styles, along with a vigorous disregard for key, his pan-diatonic chords.

What is most astounding about Carter is how he has reinvented himself over this century, and continues to compose into his 100th year—his birthday is Thursday, Dec. 11, and he will be celebrating in Boston with a new piano triad. His later work is vital, dramatic, and punctuated with sharp wit.

Oppens and CarterFirst on the program, 90+ was written in 1994 for the 90th birthday of his friend, Goffredo Petrassi. Like candles, the 90 notes of the title are brightly played and evenly measured. They are monkey bars which lighter notes swarm over. Oppens maintained a freshness and sense of inquiry through the lively shifts, from mysterious to insistent, then quieted back to musing.

Two Diversions led us down a rabbit hole to a wonderland where proportions and characters freely change. Carter compresses these voices for a single pianist (albeit a gifted one) and lets them transform past each other like Escher’s fishes and doves. The diverging musical idioms inhabit a keyless state neither sea nor sky.

Greenberg likened Night Fantasies to an analyst’s couch. Written in 1980, it demonstrates how Carter rewrote his musical language: wrestling with forms, he questioned form itself. “I finally said to Hell with the whole accessibility point of view,” he remarked, though his dreamscapes are palpable. Oppens’ rendition was both immediate and emotionally fluid. Dark chromas and primitive scents rippled through her chords. She later remarked that she had played it so often that it performed her.

After an intermission she turned to earlier work: the 1945 Piano Sonata broke new ground with its lyrical surface and mathematical substructure (here he uses every three-note chord, inventing musical set theory). Three voices speak with large gestures: slow chords find their dramatic moment, then frame quick chromatic scatterings. He moves beyond this duality with passages of sweet reverie.

Greenberg took pains to compare the improvisatory quality to Liszt’s and to parallel the second movement fugue to Beethoven’s, serving up recorded examples for a delightful look inside a composer’s process.

Oppens closed with two recent pieces, the daunting Intermittences (2005), and the taut Catenaires (2006). Hanging like a Roman catenary, a chain of rapid notes stretched without chords. Finding accent and movement within the furiously paced line required great agility, and the audience cheered after she raced up the keyboard in one long dismount to stick the landing.

As encore she played a very recent work dedicated to James Levine, rounding out a concert of Carter’s “complete” piano works as he continues to compose. The false ending and final quirky note taunted us with his energy and humor.

—Adam Broner

A version of this article originally appeared in the Piedmont Post