Composer
Biography:
Elliott Carter was born in New York on December 11, 1908. His interest in avant-garde music began in high school, where he was encouraged by Charles Ives. He studied at Harvard University with Walter Piston and Gustav Holst and in Paris with Nadia Boulanger. Since then he has lived as a composer and teacher in New York and Waccabuc (NY). He has twice won the Pulitzer Prize and is the recipient of numerous awards.
Carter's first compositions can be assigned to ›neoclassicism‹. Increasingly dissatisfied with his own musical language, he went to the Sonora desert near Tucson/Arizona in 1950 and wrote his first string quartet there. This 1-minute work marks a turning point in Carter's output. It is harsher, more dissonant and complex than his earlier works. In the past two decades, his creativity has really peaked; countless important works for orchestra, solo concertos, works for smaller ensembles and chamber music formations were created.
In 1999, at the age of 90, Carter wrote his first opera What Next, which premiered in Berlin at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden. With increasing age, his music became more transparent, more subtle and more humorous, with a fascinating and surprising wealth of forms, elegant even in the most dense counterpoint. The present recordings of the Swiss Chamber Soloists are a musical testimony to the congenial late work of one of the most important composers of the turn of the millennium.
Albums:
Isao Nakamura plays Works for Solo Percussion:
Happy Birthday Eliott Carter! – New Chamber Works:
