Classical Music | Piano Music

Recorded on 02/04/2008, uploaded on 02/07/2009

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

Considering his previous output and known predilections, Caténaires is, on the face of it, the unlikeliest of all Carter’s piano works. “When Pierre-Laurent Aimard, who performs so eloquently, asked me to write a piece for him,” Carter confesses, “I became obsessed with the idea of a fast one-line piece with no chords. It became a continuous chain of notes using different spacings, accents and colourings, to produce a wide variety of expression.” The piece Aimard duly found himself launching at Zankel Hall, New York, on December 11, 2006, not only comprises an unbroken four-minute succession of 16th notes permutating and arpeggiating all over the keyboard at a terrifying speed, but requires all manner of irregular changes of touch and dynamics, suggesting, in its later stages, a succession of “ghost” cross-pulsations. No wonder Carter has come to feel this incessant piece belongs with Intermittences: together they create a perfect balance of opposites. Yet there are precedents in the toccata-writing that intermittently darts through all of Carter’s previous piano pieces — and, perhaps, more remotely, in the strange one-line moto perpetuo Chopin composed as the finale to his Piano Sonata in B-flat minor. If so, it is a pleasing irony from a composer who set out 90 years ago just hating to practise Chopin.

Notes by Bayan Northcott

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