Arditti Quartet, Ensemble Sospeso, Ursula Oppens - Elliott Carter: Quintets & Voices (2004)

After what seems like years of delay, Mode has released this CD of chamber and vocal music in time for Elliott Carter's 95th birthday, which fell on Dec. 11, 2003. It was worth the wait. The Quintet for Piano and Strings (1997) is one of the two or three pinnacles of Carter's prolific eighties. Though undeniably an example of the his late style, it harks back to the First Quartet (1951!) in its long-lined writing for strings. The music is expansive and concise, light-hearted and dramatic all at once, and it is played to perfection by Ursula Oppens and the Arditti Quartet, the performers for whom it was written. The Arditti also provides the first recording of the brief, haunting Fragment II for string quartet (not to be confused with the FIGMENT No. 2 for solo cello). For the rest, there is a fine performance of the Quintet for Piano and Winds (the third recording and just as good as either of the others), and two vocal pieces: Tempo e tempi from 1998, and Syringa from 1978, one of Carter's most powerful works, written when he was a young man of 69. Tempo e tempi, settings of eight texts in Italian, contains some of the loveliest, most sensuous music Carter has ever written. To my ear, soprano Lucy Shelton is not as warm or expressive as Katherine Ciesinski in Syringa (Bridge 9014), or as Susan Narucki in Tempo e Tempi (also Bridge, No. 9111), but the engineering on this recording is superb, and the clarity of instrumental detail alone makes these performances worth owning.