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At the tender age of ninety Elliott Carter is now in the midst of the most productive period of his career. As if to make up for his relatively slow rate of production in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, Carter has written more than thirty-five new works since 1980 for a wide variety of instrumental and vocal combinations. This tremendous burst of creative activity has substantially enlarged the range of his accomplishments, adding both a host of miniatures (solos, duos, and trios under eight minutes in length) and the most ambitious works of his career, including the forty-five minute orchestral triptych SymphoniaSum fluxae pretium spei. To cap off his first ninety years Carter has recently completed his first opera, What Next?, to a libretto by Paul Griffiths, which will premiere in Berlin this fall, and arrive in New York the following March.
Clarity is one hallmark of Carter's recent work. The contrasting layers of his music are more sharply defined than ever, and he has begun to notate the complex rhythmic patterns he has always used in ways that make them much easier for performers to execute, mainly by eliminating the most difficult beat divisions like quintuplets and septuplets from his large ensemble pieces. Carter also has moved away from the complex and often multi-layered formal plans he used in the large-scale works of the 1960s like the String Quartet No. 2 and the Double Concerto. The Violin Concerto, for example, is in the traditional three movements: fast, slow, fast;...