Carter: Concertos

For seven years, the New York-based contemporary music ensemble Sequitur has been re-defining the concert by finding new contexts for new music. Through staging events incorporating theater and dance, or producing tantalizing cabarets on themes like lust and greed, Sequitur turns the traditional sanctimonious contemporary music experience upside down. On this disc, they re-examine the contemporary American concerto. Although it dates back to Baroque composers in the late 17th century, the concerto reached its artistic pinnacle with Romantic composers of the 19th and early 20th century. But what does the concerto mean in the United States at the beginning of the 21st century, when personal freedoms are threatened both by indiscriminate acts of terrorism and by responses that many find necessary in order to preserve safety and stability? For starters, the paradigm of “us versus them” – the message behind the concertino and ripieno of the Baroque concerto grosso as well as the heroic romantic solo concerto – seems outmoded. We shun the model of a group controlling an individual, just as we shun this model turned inside out. And our view of an individual now is rarely one of hero, or anti-hero, or even of complete self-determination. All of these ideas affect the concerto of today, where the role of the soloist is not always clearly defined, where other players may rise as soloists at times and then disappear again into the fabric, where sub-groups may compete with the soloist and with each other for prominence, where the soloist may not be poised to interact and hopefully to triumph. Even the word “concerto” may be suspect: Only Elliott Carter’s work among the four on this disc employs the word “concerto” in its title.