Carter has already done the rounds of prominent twentieth century American poets – Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Hart Crane, John Ashbury, et al – most of whom were also personal friends. So it’s surprising that it should have taken so long for him to set Wallace Stevens, whose playful language, wry wit and capacity for innocent wonder at the world seem very close indeed to the constantly shifting emotional territory of Carter’s mature work. As the programme notes reminded us, the British musicologist Wilfred Mellers spotted a kinship between the two over 40 years ago, much to Carter’s delight, and In the Distances duly gave us an appealing 15-minute tour of all Carter’s best musical habits. The first song sets Stevens’ Puella Parvula in instantly arresting, mercurial scherzo. Carter adds a shouted address from the mezzo “Little girl – listen to me!”, but the music immediately skips through any number of playful ideas, with prominent xylophone and woodwind runs – clearly the girl is paying no attention whatever to the poet, as the instruments dance irreverently around the mezzo’s sober vocal lines.
The third song, Re-statement of Romance, will stand out for all who hear it: Carter is renowned for his love of profuse detail, yet this song comprises a long, beautiful melody for mezzo and another equally transfixing one for the strings. No complexity, no fidgeting – just two wonderful melodic lines pacing gently around each other in a stately pas de deux. It held the audience spellbound.
The fourth and fifth songs, played without break, concern the fluctuating movements of wind, the natural element famously evoked in Carter’s turbulent Concerto for Orchestra from 1969, inspired by St Jean Perse’s epic poem Vents. These songs are the densest in the new cycle, but also the most pictorial: no strings at all, but a joyous welter of harmonies swirling over the wind and brass, with highly realistic gusts from percussion. Surprisingly, the last number sets Stevens’ radiant poem God is good. It is a beautiful night. A sequence of very rich and beautifully resonant chords on the whole ensemble underpins the more florid vocal writing which threads ingeniously through the music, the whole coming to a perfectly timed point of repose in the loveliest nocturne Carter has yet written. It’s hard to believe that this serene music could be by the same composer who wrote the tragic, cold-war ridden Piano Concerto exactly forty years ago. Carter probably has other surprises in store for us yet.
Julian Anderson, Gramophone.
