Search - Carter, Berio, Takemitsu :: Partita / Continuo / Visions

Partita is only the beginning.

Karl Henzy | 11/02/1999

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Well the big news is that Deutsche Grammaphone has finally released Carter's Symphonia (available in Britain, not in the U.S. as yet), of which Partita, recorded earlier and separately on this disc, is only the first movement. What the rest of Symphonia makes clear is that the sometimes playful, sometimes explosive Partita is only the youthful prelude to what is ultimately a much more sober, more meditative work--the reflections of a great composer who has witnessed the nearly the entire century (1908-present). Adagio Tenebroso, the movement that follows Partita in Symphonia, is Carter's "Unanswered Question," his meditation on pain and loss (with broken quotations, it appears, from Ives' great work). But whereas Ives' "Unanswered Question" echoes through an empty and uncomprehending universe, Carter's "bubbles up" (Symphonia is tied to Crashaw's 17th-century poem, "Bubble") in a shifting, kaleidoscopic assemblage of thoughts and experiences and observations. It then deftly gives way to the final movement, Allegro Scorrevole, which is somehow both subdued and full of energy. Taken as a whole, Symphonia is one of the greatest orchestral works of our century, yet it leaves you more thoughtful than exhilerated. Certainly, it's one of the most profound statements in the history of the arts of what the world looks like from the vantage point of ninety years."