A Busy Quiet: Elliott Carter’s Flute Concerto

Boston Symphony Orchestra
Elizabeth Rowe, flute; James Levine, conductor
Music of Schubert, Carter, and Brahms
Symphony Hall, Boston
February 5, 2010

New music by Elliott Carter has, of late, come along at such a clip that hearing it always carries with it a certain feeling of playing catch-up. Such is the case with his 2008 Flute Concerto, premiered that year in Jerusalem, but just now getting its American premiere, with James Levine conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and BSO principal flutist Elizabeth Rowe tackling the solo part. (The concerto was a BSO co-commission.) Hearing new Carter also brings with it a kind of familiar unfamiliarity: Carter’s style—the dancing, colliding intervals, the busy, darting textures, the ever-shifting temporal flow—is pretty settled, but that style still allows for so much variety that pieces still unfold as a series of tricky surprises and unexpected landscapes. Such is the case with the Flute Concerto, one of the most intriguing of Carter’s late-career solo-and-orchestra colloquies.

Carter admits in a program note that he had long avoided the idea of a flute concerto, unsure of whether the instrument could produce “the sharp attacks that I use so frequently”. He squares that circle by frequently shadowing the solo flute with clockwork chorus of percussion—especially woodblocks and marimba—harp, and piano. That combination is contrasted at the outset with ominous, rolling clouds of clusters from the rest of the orchestra, but, in Carter’s usual fashion, those lines start to blur: by the end of the first section, it’s the orchestra doing the scurrying, in great swarms, while the flute goes its own way with long, separated tones. That sets up an ingenious bit of musical drama, as the solo and orchestral flutes dovetail to produce a long, even-paced, implacably unbroken line, a quietly insistent accompaniment to a series of colorful orchestral jabs—and when the flutes stop but the jabs continue, the discovered silences between them are expressively prominent, addition by subtraction. The center of the piece is a slow-moving singing melody for the soloist, while the orchestra bides its time in its lower reaches. It’s an exotically pretty section; for Carter, the flute’s expressive core is not in its agility, it seems, but in its sheer timbre, luxuriating in its purity in a way that calls to mind Debussy—the solo flute essay Syrinx, maybe, or the languorous clarity of the opening of Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun. Brief instrumental interjections—English horn, piano, and, in one humorous non sequitur, a glorified cowbell—can’t derail the steady lyricism even as it shades into a faster cadenza, decorated with palpitating tremolos. The full orchestra returns, then drops to an agitated whisper for the last section; Carter simultaneously pays homage to the light finales of Classical concerti while giving the texture a bracing edge, a Shakespearian forest of dangerous magic. Sure enough, a few bumps in the night—and a brassy wail—ring down the curtain.

The performance was dazzling. Levine’s repeated programming of Carter and similar modernists over past seasons—subscribers be damned—has given the BSO a real authority in this kind of music. They get Carter—they get how it’s supposed to flow together, they get how expressive it can and should be, they dive into it with enough confidence to push the shapes of the phrases without losing the overall thread. The textures and colors snap into focus. Rowe was supremely, serenely adept in the solo part, embodying the old-school virtuosic command to make it look easy. It added a nice extra layer of dialogue to Carter’s method, an air of imperturbability to contrast with the orchestra’s telegraphing athleticism. This is the last Carter the BSO will play until next season—that’s based on the reasonably safe assumption that Levine wouldn’t be able to let an entire season go without getting something on the schedule—and, in good theatrical fashion, they left me wanting more.

The concert opened with selections from Franz Schubert’s incidental music to the long-forgotten play Rosamunde—the overture (which wasn’t actually written for the play at all, a musicological error that now requires an even longer musicological explanation, so never mind), the Entr’acte after Act III, and the Andantino Ballet Music, probably the most well-known piece from this haul. Levine, not surprisingly, brought out the operatic overtones, in the midst of a plush, dark-hued (if not dark-mood) reading, a rich restraint that hinted at untapped sensation—given Schubert’s fount of melody, and the uncanny way he could time simple harmonic shifts for optimum drama, an unexpected kinship with Verdi came to the fore. After intermission was Brahms, the Fourth Symphony; the orchestra produced a big sound, firmly-outlined opulence. The aggressive bleakness—the Fourth plays out kind of like heroic Beethoven without the heroic triumph—was almost exuberantly tragic. Levine emphasized activity and counterpoint over architecture—all the cross-rhythms were compressed into the forward edge of the sound, broken floes jostling for position, the late-Romantic ground fracturing beneath Brahms’ feet, with no prospect of safe haven.