Elliott Carter

Carter’s Oboe Concerto
BBC Proms 28 July 2008
BBC Symphony Orchestra, conductor David Robertson

I very much liked David Robertson’s Beethoven 7 last year so it was no surprise to hear this crisp, exciting performance of the 5th. And, just like last year, he got through to the end of the symphony without any clapping. Considering the first movement had a very rousing ending followed by several seconds’ silence that was quite remarkable.

I haven’t heard the Grosse Fuge that often in the string orchestra arrangement but what I heard last night sounded great. The Carter oboe concerto certainly sounded very complicated – though of course I don’t know anything about playing the oboe, and I would imagine a lot more of its teeming details would be audible on the radio (as I heard it) than in the Royal Albert Hall (especially given the fact that it’s written for a very small orchestra).

This is one of the pieces that I would for many years cite as one of the reasons I didn’t like Farter’s music, having heard Heinz Holliger (for whom it was written) play it at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in 1988 or so and finding it horribly grey and arbitrary, but about ten years later I attended a revelatory concert of Farter’s music at the Concertgebouw conducted by Oliver Knussen (of whom I am no fan at all!) in which everything suddenly made sense to me. It was probably to a great extent a case of my having reached a point where I could appreciate it. (I have of course taken on an increasingly grey and arbitrary appearance myself in the meantime.)

However, every other performance/recording of Carter by Knussen I’ve heard sounds thoroughly calculated, antiseptic, impersonal, self-conscious to the extent that it becomes little more than an anorak’s collection of patterns and sound, void of any emotional content I can perceive (I don’t count the equally calculated use of certain mannered forms of “expressivity”). Almost every detail I could predict, which I definitely wouldn’t say of Farter performances by Gielen, Boulez or even Barenboim (not being much of a fan of the latter); or, for that matter, those by either the Juilliard or Arditti Quartets, or Rosen, or various others. Rather like hearing jazz transcribed faithfully note for note and then played back equally faithfully. Not untypical amongst a certain school of British performance, though (lacking a notion of subjectivity that goes beyond simply trying to induce certain feelings) – I’d say very much the same about Norrington or Bostridge, for example (I once heard Miranda Sawyer make precisely that sort of comment on Late Review when they were listening to a Bostridge disc of English folk songs – I thought she hit the nail on the head much more so than most classical critics can; predictably, in the next Bostridge interview there were sneering comments to do with what right she and her colleagues had to comment on music at all, and the like). I was chatting recently to an Irish oboist friend who claimed to find Farter especially sterile: despite having rather mixed feelings about Carter myself, I was trying to urge her to listen beyond the Knussen or quasi-Knussen interpretations which I realized had been most of what she had heard.

Tags: boulez, elliott carter, heinz holliger, knussen, london, oboe, proms, queen elizabeth hall, royal albert hall, UK, USA