Elliott Carter
Elliott Carter (1908–2012) was an American modernist composer whose personal harmonic and rhythmic language shaped chamber and instrumental music across more than seven decades. Twice awarded the Pulitzer Prize, he remained prolific into his final years.
His early mature scores already set instruments on independent rhythmic paths. The Piano Sonata (MD 3286) of 1946 and the Sonata for cello and piano (TP032) of 1948 are landmarks of that turn, pairing formal clarity with the metric freedom that would mark his later music.
He wrote orchestral, chamber, solo and vocal works performed worldwide, among them a celebrated cycle of string quartets and the large-scale orchestral triptych Symphonia: sum fluxae pretium spei.
Compositions by Elliott Carter appear on
Tensile Flame
Michael Kieran Harvey’s two-disc piano programme pairs Liszt’s B minor Sonata and its early twentieth-century echoes in Skryabin, Rachmaninov and Ravel with a second disc of Stravinsky, Carter, Graham Hair and Carl Vine’s 1990 Piano Sonata.