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ELLIOTT CARTER : Concerto for Orchestra

Thursday 5 February, 1970

Philharmonic Hall, New York, NY

New York Philharmonic, cond. Leonard Bernstein

Associated Music Publishers, 1972 (HL50225800)

“I had been thinking about writing a work which treated most of the players in the orchestra as soloists, when the commission from the New York Philharmonic started me off. In casting about for a plan, a dramatic and musical structure for such a multiple concerto, I came across St. John Perse’s 'Vents'  (Winds), a long poem about America which suggested a way of ordering a piece. I realized at once, of course, that the broad, Whitmanesque rhetoric of the poem could only partially be reflected in the music whose main aim was to give individual, human expression to a great variety of players; yet the poem’s fluidity and its changes of character offered a useful model.”

— Elliott Carter