arts: Royal College of Music Free Lunchtime Concert

At the Royal Academy I caught a real bright young talent, Chris Guild give a dramatic, intense and emotional peformance of Elliott Carter's Piano Sonata (1945/6) a difficult piece of music.

Chris performed this rapid and complex piece for over 35 minutes without sheet music, an amazing achievement to play with such difficult music, large sections of which were extremely rapid and all from memory. The intensity of the playing was overwhelming at times, the discordant and abstract music is not easy on the ear (and there was some frustrated shuffling in the audience who were perhaps hoping something more orthodox).

Chris clearly has a promising career ahead of him:

“An artist of individuality... a charismatic performer” - Royal College of Music, London, June 2008

“His shaping of all the pieces was remarkable… His maturity was also evident in the confident and considerate way in which he ‘handled’ the audience with such charm and authority. He has a great future.” - Review of the Knockando Woolmill Restoration Fund Recital, August 2007.

“As always, his technique was impeccable…” - St Michael’s at SIX, Edinburgh, August 2007

“A consummate musician with a most impressive gift.” - St Mary’s Music School, Edinburgh, May 2005

“One of Scotland’s most promising young musicians” - The Northern Scot, November 2001

“…set for an assured pianistic future” - Hexham Courier, May 2004

http://www.freewebs.com/christopherleeguild/

Chris choose this piece to mark Elliott Carter's 100 burthday:

From 1940 to 1944 Elliott Carter taught courses in physics, mathematics and classical Greek, in addition to music, at St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland. On July 6, 1939, Carter married Helen Frost-Jones. They had one child, a son, David Chambers Carter. During World War II, Carter worked for the Office of War Information. He later held teaching posts at the Peabody Conservatory (1946 - 1948), Columbia University, Queens College, New York (1955-56), Yale University (1960-62), Cornell University (from 1967) and the Juilliard School (from 1972). In 1967 he was appointed a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Carter has lived in Greenwich Village since 1945.

Carter's earlier works are influenced by Stravinsky, Harris, Copland, and Hindemith, and are mainly neoclassical in aesthetic. He had a strict and thorough training in counterpoint, from medieval polyphony through Stravinsky, and this shows in his earliest music, such as the ballet Pocahontas (1938-9). Some of his music during the Second World War is frankly diatonic, and includes a melodic lyricism reminiscent of Samuel Barber. Interestingly, Carter abandoned neoclassicism around the same time Stravinsky did, saying that he felt he had been evading vital areas of feeling.

His music after 1950 is typically atonal and rhythmically complex, indicated by the invention of the term metric modulation to describe the frequent, precise tempo changes found in his work. While Carter's chromaticism and tonal vocabulary parallels serial composers of the period, Carter does not employ serial techniques in his music. Rather he independently developed and cataloged all possible collections of pitches (i.e. all possible 3 note chords, 5 note chords etc.). Musical theorists like Allen Forte later systematized this data into musical set theory. A series of works in the 1960s and 1970's generates its tonal material by using all possible chords of a particular number of pitches.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliott_Carter

One word of caution, I'm not sure about the choice of music for a casual lunchtime concert, yes it was deeply impressive but most of the audience were hoping for something more accessible?

Why do men driven to push themselves to such extremes of excellence? Sometimes to the point they lose the admiration of the common man / woman?