orchestras hyperprism harpsichord compositions

classical music:

2 reviews
Polyphony, Stephen Layton

Hyperion UK, 2004

Sublimely beautiful!
Heavenly music, beautifully captured in a location with fantastic acoustics. This is music that needs to be heard on headphones or outstanding surround sound to be really appreciated. Here I am in February still listening to this CD of Xmas music... it's very calming to the soul. I can't recommend this highly enough.

Songs of America

3 reviews
Samuel Adler, Milton Babbitt, ...

Nonesuch, 1992

a beautiful rendition of 20th Century American Song
This is a great album. It spans the spectrum of 20th Century American music from the tonality and romanticism of Stephen Foster to the experimentality of John Cage. Jan DeGaetani and Gilbert Kalish, with their understanding and sensitivity to the music of their time, combine to form a duo that sets the standard for interpretation of this music. Students, professionals, and general classical ...

Elliott Carter: Concerto for Orchestra; Violin Concerto; Three Occasions for Orchestra

2 reviews
Elliott Carter, Oliver Knussen, ...

EMI Classics, 2008

Outstanding Carter Album
EMI Classics presents three Carter works, over an hour of the most difficult music imaginable, brilliantly played and recorded. This inexpensive collection is a great opportunity to listen to and gain an understanding of Carter's challenging music. The Three Occasions for Orchestra are a good introduction to Carter's sound world. The pieces are relatively short, so they are less of a strain on ...

Cage; Carter; Babbitt; Schuller

5 reviews
Milton Babbitt, John Cage, ...

Polygram Records, 1994

Outstanding Recording!
The Carter, Cage, Babbitt and Schuller are spectacularly colorful and vivid. This is great music that deserves its place in the cannon. Each composer is well represneted here - superb recording! Especially of note here is the Carter Variations for Orchestra - A brilliant piece (terribly neglected!) wonderfully presented. Mr. Levine and DG are to be congratulated for making this music so easily ...

Elliott Carter: String Quartets Nos.1-4 / Elegy

2 reviews
Elliott Carter, Arditti String Quartet

Et'Cetera, 2005

Carter's quartets, the finest of the late 20th century!
The Arditti Quartet was the first to record Elliott Carter's first four string quartets -- this is the reissue of those recordings, originally on two separate discs, released in 1989. No remastering has been done, only the packaging is improved, with an elegant slimline disc, new cover art, and some new photos. The original liner notes on the quartets by David Harvey are retained, but there is ...

Carter: String Quartets Nos. 1 & 5

6 reviews
Elliott Carter, Pacifica Quartet

Naxos American Classics, 2008

The short preview tracks are enough to say purchase now!
At age 50, I have had a life long and developing appreciation of less than strongly tonally centered music, starting with love of Schoenberg's works when I was merely a late teenager. Listening over time has strengthend my appreciation, and listening to great masters like Sessions, Ligeti, Cowell, and many others, bears increasing satisfaction in seeing the history of the 20th Century start to ...

Oppens Plays Carter
Elliott Carter, Ursula Oppens

Cedille, 2008

"Oppens played [Carter] with an unfailing sense of drama and almost cinematic color." -- New York Times [January 2008 recital review]

The Music of Elliott Carter Vol. 7; Boston Concerto, Cello Concerto, ASKO Concerto, Dialogues

6 reviews
Fred Sherry, Elliott Carter, ...

Bridge Records; Inc., 2005

Late Carter at its best
Elliott Carter's compositional career has already lasted far beyond what anyone could have expected, with works still flowing from his pen at the age of 97. This disc confirms the composer's continued late success; all four works on it date from the composer's nineties and three of them are previously unrecorded. Dialogues, for piano and small chamber orchestra, is one of those works whose ...

Elliott Carter: Sonata for Flute, Oboe, Cello & Harpsichord; Sonata for Cello & Piano; Double Concerto for ...

7 reviews
Fred Sherry, Joel Krosnick, ...

Nonesuch, 1992

A good place to start with Carter
Carter is considered to be perhaps the greatest living composer, and I didn't know any of his music, so after browsing the internet (and in particular,Amazon) for a place to start, I obtained this CD. I have been delighted with it. All of this music takes some acclimation, but that's the nice thing about a CD--you can stick a CD of new music in the car stereo and play it as often as you need to ...

Elliott Carter: A Symphony of Three Orchestras; Varèse: Deserts; Ecuatorial; Hyperprism

8 reviews
Elliott Carter, Edgard Varese, ...

Sony, 1995

fantastic Carter and Varese, strangely combined
Though the combination of Carter and Varese is odd, I can't see giving this disc, part of the superb Sony PIERRE BOULEZ series, anything less than 5 stars. It is the only available recording of Carter's "Symphony for Three Orchestras" (1976 -- 15'41), and the Varese is uniformly excellent as well. It strikes me as simultaneously bizarre and marvelous that Carter's work, which was written to ...

Romances & Elegies for Viola & Piano

2 reviews
Benjamin Britten, Elliott Carter, ...

Ecm Records, 2000

Sensitive Playing
I was pleased to see this recording By Kim Kashkashian. The interplay between the viola and the piano is exceptional and it is clear these two performers have a fine sense of the music. The typical ECM recording excellence adds to this effect. This is twentieth century and somber music. The warmth of Kashkashian's viola makes this recording the perfect match for a fine bordeaux and a quiet ...

Elliott Carter: The Complete music for Piano

4 reviews
Elliott Carter, Spoken Word, ...

Bridge, 1997

Fine playing of three piano masterworks
Almost every CD of new works should feature a conversation with the composer. There never was a time when this wasn't necessary. Rosen is a great question-asker, and Carter creates a context for us out here with reflections from the history of music. And such gems as Carter's interest in jazz is discussed, the freedom from the tyranny of the barline,improvisation and his interests in early ...

The Music of Elliott Carter, Volume Four

2 reviews
Elliott Carter, William Purvis, ...

Bridge, 2001

Tympani Brilliance
There is certainly no accounting for taste. Unlike the preceeding reviewer, the piece on this recording that really impressed me is "Eight Pieces For Four Tympani." All the other pieces are quite good as well, but the tympani piece is superb. Daniel Druckman is indeed a tympani vituoso. However, the typani piece is not simply virtuosity for the sake of virtuosity. There is genuine creativity and ...

The Music of Elliott Carter, Volume Five - Nine Compositions (1994-2002)

3 reviews
Peter Kolkay, Fred Sherry, ...

Bridge, 2002

Vive le Carter!
The fifth offering in Bridge's indispensible series of the music of Elliott Carter contains nine compositions written from 1994 to 2002, when the composer, incredibly, was between the ages of 85 and 93. There are the usual short gems for various instruments that Carter has made a specialty in recent years. The disk begins with the fascinating "Steep Steps" for solo bass clarinet, an instrument ...

Carter: Oboe Concerto, Esprit Rude - Esprit Doux, a Mirror on Which to Dwell

2 reviews
Elliott Carter, Pierre Boulez

Apex/Warner Classics, 2006

One of the best Carter collections around, and reissued at budget price
This Warner Apex disc, a reissue of an 1992 release on Erato, contains four pieces by Elliott Carter in performance by the Ensemble Intercontemporain conducted by Pierre Boulez. The music here shows the kinder, gentler Carter who arose in the late 1970's, and though his writing is still biting and modernistic, there's an economy of means and a greater sweetness than his earlier mature work. ...

Permit Me Voyage: Songs by American Composers

1 review
Dominick Argento, Giovanni Battista Buonamente, ...

Albany Records, 1995

A real find
This is a terrific recording of some familar and some little-known American composers. The most substantial work in this varied collection is certainly the Argento setting of selections from the diary of Virginia Woolf. Mary Ann Hart must be just about the ideal interpretter of these powerful songs. Great vocalism, great musicianship, and a special ability to do what the music demands without ...

Elliott Carter: Piano Concerto; Concerto for Orchestra; Concerto for Orchestra; Three Occasions

6 reviews
Elliott Carter, Michael Gielen, ...

Arte Nova Classics, 2005

A classic Carter recording reissued
This budget-price recording, featuring two Elliott Carter specialists, the pianist Ursula Oppens and the conductor Michael Gielen, has long been a highlight of the composer's discography. Now reissued in rather more attractive packaging, it remains an essential disc for those who know and love Carter's highly complex, densely atonal music. The 1965 Piano Concerto is one of the composer's most ...

Early Chamber Music of Elliott Carter

2 reviews
Elliott Carter, Chicago Pro Musica, ...

Cedille, 1999

Carter for Novices
Whenever someone wants to scare away a conservative music lover, one of the sure ways to do it is to mention the name of Elliot Carter. Carter, the grand old man of 20th century American composition, has become synonymous with dense, atonal and highly academic East Coast American writing. But before Carter became, Carter the Forbidding, he was an American modernist in the Copland tradition. This ...

Juxtapositions: Elliott Carter - A Labyrinth of Time

2 reviews
Elliott Carter

Juxtapositions, 2006

nice tribute to Mr. Carter
This is a nice tribute to Mr. Carter, a gentle man in the way he speaks, quite different than his ruggedly thorny, powerful penumbral anguish- ridden music. Carter's music sits conceptually in the center of the 20th Century, so Charles Rosen tells us, in an appearance here between Stravinsky and Schoenberg or situated with strong reference to the European post-war musical paradigm. Rosen plays ...

Odd Couple

1 review
Samuel Barber, Elliott Carter, ...

OXINGALE RECORDS, 2008

delicious tone
Mr. Haimovitz and Burleson set a deliciously ominous tone with the pieces selected for this Cello/Piano duet. I find this music to be especially inspiring and fresh the way it is presented, especially the new Cantos for Slava a tribute to recently deceased master Mstislav Rostropovich. s_dennis@hotmail.com

search for classical music
compositions, harpsichord, hyperprism, juxtapositions, orchestras

Impressum / about us