Elliott Carter Festival: Day One














I've just back from first night of the University of Minnesota/Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra's Elliott Carter festival: the premiere of Frank Scheffer's Carter documentary Labyrinth of Time. In a word...excellent. In more than a single word (in stream of unconsciousness that boreders on Rosie O'Donnellissmmsss!)...

Walking through the strangely active streets of the usually dead downtown St. Paul (Minnesota Wild game at the nearby Excel Energy Center). Finding parking is a pain. A homeless man screams and spits as I walk by. The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra building is part of a larger complex of office buildings, banks and shops. All is quiet on the streets. Saint Paul is Minneapolis' strange, inward and depressed cousin.
The SPCO is a darkly swanky little place. Marble floors, large elevators with mirrors. Third floor in a small little auditorium a crowd of no more than 30 well-dressed older men and women. I am the youngest and the only person not in a suit. (I'm wearing a t-shirt and jeans).

The film is, like it's subject, exquisitely refined, slightly dreamy, troublesome and unsettling. Tons of wonderful footage. The old man breathes heavily while composing. The painful process of writing his music. He walks the streets of New York City. He mentions the 'confusion' of modern life he expresses in his music. He points out a car on fire as sirens blaze on a corner in Brooklyn-"See? Confusion" he smiles. Beautiful footage of the man riding in a car in Berlin at night (around the time of the performance there of What Next? with Barenboim conducting-Barenboim makes amusing comments about Carter as an American barbarian from the land of Coca Cola taking the snobby European artistic elite by storm). The city lights blur. Carter looks like a mafia hit man riding in a fancy car. Touching footage of the man and his late wife of so many years. Carter: "She does the cooking...But I make the beds." Boulez and Carter talk about the difficulty of the Clarinet Concerto, and Mahler and Berg's scoring methods. Carter offering helpful and fascinatingly romantic comments to Ursula Oppens on the opening of his Piano Concerto. "Don't listen to me though-play it like you feel." he keeps saying-too much of a gentleman to exercise his will and smother the performer. Carter visiting his old Parisian haunts from the Boulanger days-searches Boulanger's teaching diaries and smiles when he finds a mention of himself. A luminescent choral performance of an early 7 part counterpoint exercise written in Boulanger's class for the composer who hasn't heard it in 60 years.
Lots of bittersweet footage of the composer's work window looking on the Twin Towers. The workers at Ground Zero are edited perfectly to look like the policemen in What Next?.
Carter walks the Brooklyn Bridge at night; a singular, kindly old man with a smile admist a chaos of movement around of him, bikers cars lights horns.

I am humbled. An entirely convincing and smart portrait of a great musical mind and a important composer. A great movie that is required viewing.

I walk out into the city and drunken hockey fans cheer and laugh the homeless man is screaming and being tortured by some invisible demons and the Cathedral is on the hill.