String Quartet No.5 (1995)

1 Introduction – 2 Giocoso – 3 Interlude I – 4 Lento espressivo – 5 Interlude II – 6 Presto scorrevole – 7 Interlude III – 8 Allegro energico –9 Interlude IV –

10 Adagio sereno – 11 Interlude V – 12 Capriccioso

A celebration of a composer’s centenary when he is still alive is a rare event and a still rarer, or even unique, event when that composer is still working. Whether Elliott Carter, who achieved his 100th birthday in December, will produce a sixth string quartet – having written one every ten years or so since 1951, he must be thinking about it – we will have to wait and see. But it is remarkable enough that he wrote his fifth when he was 87 and, far from taking the risk of repeating himself in any way, made it "a farewell to the previous four and an exploration of a new vision."

Carter explains his approach in a note in the (Boosey & Hawkes) score: “One of the fascinations of attending rehearsals of chamber music, when excellent players try out fragments of what they later will play in the ensemble, then play it, and then stop abruptly to discuss how to improve, is that this pattern is so similar to our inner experience of forming, ordering, focussing, and bringing to fruition – and then dismissing – our feelings and ideas. These patterns of human behavior form the basis of the 5th String Quartet. Its introduction presents the players, one by one, trying out fragments of later passages from one of the six short, contrasting ensemble movements, at the same time maintaining a dialogue with each other. Between each of the movements the players discuss in different ways what has been played and what will be played. In this score the matter of human cooperation with its many aspects of feeling and thought was a very important consideration.”

Not unlike Dutilleux’s string quartet Ainsi la nuit (1976) in form, Carter’s Fifth is made up of 12 movements linked in an unbroken continuity but with the even-numbered ones standing out from the apparently random interludes by virtue of their cohesive rather than fragmented textures and their distinctive personalities – a hyper-active Giocoso, a comparatively static Lento espressivo of sustained dissonances, a skittering Presto scorrevole in which each instrument has its own rhythmic identity, an aggressive Allegro energico, an Adagio sereno coloured almost exclusively by harmonics, and a brilliantly concevied Capriccioso of nothing but pizzicato until the closing bars..