A Composer Who’s 99 With Plenty To Celebrate

Perhaps it’s true that composers of formidably complex music, like Elliott Carter, are tough sells for mainstream audiences. That is why the scene at the Juilliard School on Friday night was so encouraging. Outside the school’s Peter Jay Sharp Theater a long line of people stood in the wintry chill, hoping to get tickets for the first concert of Focus! 2008: All About Elliott, the school’s free, weeklong festival devoted to music by Mr. Carter, interspersed with works by composers who influenced him and by sympathetic colleagues.

This festival sets in motion a wave of international celebrations for Mr. Carter, who will turn 100 in December. For this program students from the New Juilliard Ensemble, the school’s crack contemporary-music group, were joined by players from the Lucerne Festival Academy Ensemble, conducted by Pierre Boulez, no less. Three musicians from the Paris-based Ensemble InterContemporain assisted with the coaching for this intensely demanding program of works by Mr. Carter, Mr. Boulez, Stravinsky and Varèse. All the performances were accomplished and exciting.

The evening began with an earthy account of Varèse’s ornery, captivating “Intégrales.” Mr. Carter was in the audience when this work received its New York premiere in 1925. Here was a score of a thorny modernist forging his own undogmatic voice from the radical currents of the day. Mr. Carter would follow Varèse’s example, if not his approach.

Mr. Carter’s “Triple Duo” (1982), which came next, was a reminder of the unabashed complexity of his music from the 1970s and ’80s. Some of his newfound popularity with audiences is because of the thinning-out of textures and overlapping events characteristic of the pieces he has written in his 90s. (Have we ever in music history spoken about the prolific output of a composer in his 90s?)

There is an acoustical, spatial element to “Triple Duo,” scored for three duos of instruments: flute and clarinet, violin and cello, piano and percussion. It’s hard to think of another 20-minute span of music during which so much happens, as skittish outbursts from the duos converse and collide. Though the sheer profusion of musical events is sometimes stupefying, the piece is riveting moment to moment.

Much the same could be said of “Penthode” (1984-85), a dauntingly dense score for large ensemble. But in both works Mr. Carter miraculously makes every fidgety line, glittering color and rhythmic flight audible through the lucidity of his ingenious craft.

Mr. Boulez’s music has also generated fear among certain concertgoers. But here his short sextet “Dérive I,” a work of delicacy, sensuality and color, made him seem the Ravel of our time.

My favorite Carter piece on this occasion was the Clarinet Concerto from 1996, when he was entering his less-is-more phase. In each of its seven contrasting and connected sections, the soloist — the brilliant, fearless young clarinetist Ismail Lumanovski — aligned himself with various instrumental contingents of the large ensemble.

At the end Mr. Carter, though a little weak on his feet, congratulated the performers and basked in the audience’s ovation. He has begun a busy year, which will include the premieres of several works. How amazing is that?

The Focus! 2008 festival at the Juilliard School, devoted to Elliott Carter, has five more free programs through Saturday night, when James Levine conducts the Juilliard Orchestra; (212) 769-7406; juilliard.edu.

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