Treat Worth the Travail

Seven years ago, the Ford Foundation gave Pianist Jacob Lateiner a $5,000 grant to commission a new work. "Being very lazy by nature," he explains, "I did not want to spend time learning a new piece that I could only play a few times because of its novelty. I wanted to strive for something, no matter how difficult it might be, that would be valuable decades from now." So Lateiner asked Elliott Carter, one of modern music's most original and complex composers, to write a piano concerto.

Carter completed the piece only a year ago, and then Lateiner, a deeply cerebral pianist (TIME, Aug. 19), worked on it doggedly for nine months. He postponed last fall's scheduled premiere for two months so that he could practice it some more, at one point holed up in the Steinway warehouse in Boston for six hours a day. Finally, last week Carter's concerto was given its world premiere, with Erich Leinsdorf and the Boston Symphony. Lateiner's homework paid off. He played with a flair and a command that are rare in such a complex work, and though the concerto provoked a few shudders among antimodernists in the audience, it was a treat worth the travail.

Misguided Mass. In conception, the concerto is an extension of the ideas that Carter expounded in his 1959 String Quartet No. 2, in which the "individual behavior patterns" of each instrument clash and clamor for attention like so many egocentrics in a group-therapy session. Carter describes his Piano Concerto as a conflict between man and society: "The piano is born. Then the orchestra teaches it what to say. The piano learns. Then it learns the orchestra is wrong. They fight and the piano wins--not triumphantly, but with a few weak, sad notes--sort of Charlie Chaplin humorous." In the first movement, the piano lightheartedly followed the lead of the orchestra, then gradually swerved off on its own tangent, while the orchestra shouted its disapproval with great thunderclaps of dense, dissonant chords.

In the second and final movement, the orchestra passively receded, as the piano charged ahead impulsively in a passionate recitative, interrupted now and then by a concertino (three winds, four strings) that Carter likens to "Job's friends, who sympathize and comment." After one final free-for-all, the concerto ended with a quiet, reflective passage by the piano, signifying, says Carter, "the alienation of the individual from the misguided mass." The score rumbled and shook and shouted in constantly shifting tempos and atonalities and astonishingly original--and difficult --rhythms. Most striking was Carter's technique of "swamping"--building thick, eerie clouds of sound by simultaneously intertwining dozens of musical strands.

Carter, a professor of music at M.I.T., is one of America's outstanding contemporary composers, but as with most modernists, his works only a pittance. So he reasons: "Since you don't get any money, you might as well do things that amuse you. It takes me a long time to write a piece of music --anywhere from months to years--and simple ideas would bore me before I got through. Anyway, I want to invent something I haven't heard before."

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