Carter surprises

By the time you read these words, Elliott Carter — save for a wry ‘act of God’ — will have passed his 100th birthday, in full productive spate as he enters a second century. As Stephen Pettitt remarked (Arts, 29 November), every new Carter work appeared to be summatory; but there’s always been more. And further surprises: What Next?, the title of the first foray into opera (at the age of 90), has come to stand for everyone’s expectant attitude.

Perhaps most surprising of all in the late spate (nine new works last year, 11 this, the so-far high tide of an acceleration consistent since the mid-Eighties), is the virtual absence of any music sounding ‘old’ or ‘late’. One thinks of Fauré, Strauss, Vaughan Williams: distillation, strangeness, retrospect, farewell. One recent Carter score alone seems like the product of a very old man, a song-cycle on Wallace Stevens entitled In the Distances of Sleep, composed in 2006.