Not only is Carter's Symphonia the largest orchestral work he ever composed – shortly before he turned 90 – but it's also one of the most significant symphonies of the late 20th century

"A symphony beyond symphonies" is how Paul Griffiths describes Elliott Carter's Symphonia: sum fluxae pretium spei ("I am the prize of flowing hope"). It must have seemed that coming up with an almost 50-minute symphonic work would be "beyond" the powers of the 85-year-old composer when he started working on the composition of the first of its three, large-scale movements. Or at least that its completion would be merely a "hopeful" prospect; the fact that Carter finished the piece, and that it was premiered in full shortly before his 90th birthday, makes it the most significant symphony by any octogenarian in the late 20th century.

However, the mere fact that that the Symphonia is Carter's biggest-ever orchestral work, conceived and realised at a time when he can't have known or thought that he would keep living – and keep composing – for another 14 years (he died aged 103 in 2012), is hardly the main point of this piece. What makes Symphonia so special is that the piece is pitched in a place "beyond" the conventional confines of the symphony, because of the scale and scope of what it's attempting, poetically, musically and structurally. It's music that winds up reconfiguring what a symphony might be at the end of the 20th century, by which time the form had been battered, bruised and contorted out of all recognition to its heroic phase in the late 19th century; and which does so, paradoxically, because it defies, ignores, or flat-out contradicts the conventions of symphonic discourse. That's an astonishing achievement for any composer to attempt, let alone one in the middle of their ninth decade. (There I go again with the whole age thing ... still, Carter's prodigious late period of creativity is something unique in musical culture!)

The first clue to the work's iridescent and effervescent vitality is in that subtitle. It comes from a Latin poem, "Bulla" ("Bubble") by the 17th-century English writer Richard Crashaw. It's a hymn to the transitory joys and tragedies of life, imagined form the perspective of – or rather, through the multi-coloured prism of – a bubble:

Here now, there now, coming, going

Wand'ring as if ebbing, flowing:

Sporting Passion's colours all

In ways that are bacchanal



The metaphor of the bubble works as a meditation on the fleeting nature of human existence, but it's also a profound and apposite analogy for the musical experience: any musical performance beings and ends, and lives and dies, with the vividness and fragility of "The brief substance of a dream", just like Crashaw's bubble. Carter's last movement, his Allegro Scorrevole ("Flowingly Fast") is the most obviously weightless and ethereal of the three parts of Symphonia, but Carter isn't content only to create music of dissolutely spume and foment (although there is plenty of that, like the music that starts the movement). In fact, the torrent of the Allegro Scorrevole coalesces into some of the most "intensely expressive lines" (Carter's own words), especially in his writing for the strings, that he ever wrote for orchestra.

And just before the final disappearing act, as the music transfigures into the stratosphere, and silence, with a solo piccolo, there's a huge, and decidedly violent climax. That climactic chord contains all 12 pitches of the chromatic scale, the aural equivalent of being temporarily blinded by the sun – or, on an infinitely smaller scale, being lost in the rainbow iridescence of the gleaming surface of a bubble. Here's Crashaw again:

Since all colours you discern,

No one colour may you learn



That's precisely the effect of Carter's use of the total chromatic (total "coloured" – the root of the musical term lies in the visual world). And in fact, the carefully calibrated climactic moment in all three movements, among the only times Carter asks his orchestra to play "fff", forte-fortissimo (which occurs in a structurally similar place in the opening Partita and the central Adagio Tenebroso to the Allegro Scorrevole, shortly before the end) is in every case a 12-note, chromatically complete chord. It's as if Carter allows his musical bubbles to collide, collapse, and conjoin with one another to produce an image of the teeming, kaleidoscopic chaos of Crashaw's Bulla.

But there's more. Carter's three movements present three different states of being. In the Partita, Carter says that his "musical intention was to present the many changes and oppositions of mood that make up our experience of life". That's what you hear throughout this movement, an ever-changing, continuously unpredictable play of different speeds of musical material, different modes of expression, from fragmentary explosions to intensely felt melodic lines. And the idea of a game is important in this piece, because, as Carter goes on, "like all games this piece adheres rather strictly to certain laid-down rules within which it presents a large expanse of action and expression". The slow movement, the longest of the three, comes the closest that Carter ever did to a lament, a prolonged outpouring of musical lines that search vainly, tenebrously, for respite; and they do so, extremely unusually for Carter, in the same time-signature and tempo throughout this 17-and-a-half minute structure. In fact, the third movement is also cast in a single speed and metre, and its essential expressivity and strangeness is to make a large, 12-minute form out of the act of disappearing.

"Form"? Not really. That's what makes Symphonia so paradoxical. Carter's symphonic idea owes absolutely nothing to the ideas of development or recapitulation that are so central to so many of the symphonies in this series. In fact, Carter's music is better thought of as being in a ceaseless state of forming; that's to say, the music's form is made experientially rather than than architecturally, in the moment the music is happening in time instead of put together in a pre-made plan. (To use a phrase Harrison Birtwistle often employs about his own music, the music is in a "continual state of exposition".) And yet, although Carter says that all three movements can be performed separately, just as they were commissioned and premiered individually by orchestras in Chicago, London and Cleveland, the total experience of Symphonia is profoundly, unmistakably symphonic. Or maybe symphoniac ... The end of Crashaw's poem says:

My Bubble lives but if thou choose to read.

Cease thou to read, and I resign my breath;

Cease thou to read, and that will be my death



Similarly, Carter's Symphonia dissolves into thin air in its final moments, but its experience will live on with you if you go on the epic, always-changing journey of the spirit and imagination that defines the piece.

And you must do so with this performance, the only recording that exists of the whole piece – and a magnificent one it is too, thanks to Oliver Knussen's uniquely authoritative advocacy as a conductor, the BBC Symphony Orchestra's dazzling playing, and some stellar sound, to boot. Enjoy venturing into the world of Carter and Crashaw's bubble...



Reading on mobile? Listen to an excerpt from Symphonia here

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