elliott carter’s DOUBLE CONCERTO (ca. 1973) ❧ 97
It so happened that the Monday of our fi rst meeting with composer and
conductor was the very day on which the builders were to come in to start work
on the addition of two new wings to my house. As punctual as everyone else,
they arrived with bulldozers, trucks, and crane to begin the removal of several
tons of granite rocks that obstructed the site of the new additions. We made
a perch for Gustav Meier and his music stand from which he could conduct
the two of us, as far as it was of any use to rehearse the work without the other
instruments. Meanwhile, the builders had gone to work in earnest. Added to
the deafening noise going on outside, the sounds we produced were perhaps
even more alarming. Charles Rosen can hit a piano harder than any pianist I
have ever met, and soon the fl oor was littered with the ivories that fl aked off
the hapless keyboard of my poor old Bösendorfer. From time to time, when
the crunching thud of a particularly large piece of granite was heard as it was
dropped into the truck outside, Elliott would remark as he looked up from his
score, “I might have had that in my percussion section.”
Any proper balance between the two keyboard instruments was virtually
nonexistent, at least in terms of the indications in the score. Although Elliott
had made all the registrations himself on a borrowed Challis harpsichord
identical with mine, with a sensitivity that I found astonishing, he had done
all this work in a small and resonant room without taking into account the
diminution of carrying power that overtakes the harpsichord in a concert hall
as compared with the capacities of the piano to hold its own. Amplifi cation of
the harpsichord in the forthcoming performance was unthinkable because of
the additional complications it would have brought to our rehearsals and to
the disposition of instruments on the stage. The placing of instruments was
further complicated by the fact that after my two cataract operations I had lost
focusing power and much of my peripheral vision so that seeing the score and
conductor at the same time posed its problems. Ordinarily I got around this
diffi culty by playing from memory or by using a full score which permitted me
absolute security, especially as I had never become accustomed to playing from
a single keyboard part and to the counting of measures that is demanded by
long rests. Fortunately, I had the assistance as page turner of Paul Jacobs, who
eventually took over the harpsichord part in most of the subsequent perfor-
mances of this work.
My initial panic at fi rst seeing the score was prolonged by not receiving the
last third of the harpsichord part until less than ten days before the perfor-
mance. I had declared that the only further disaster that could be imagined
would be a heat wave in New York. And a heat wave indeed there was, so that
while dripping with perspiration I could never distinguish its purely physical
effects from those created by my own terror-stricken state. Somehow we got
through the fi rst performance of the Double Concerto and were to record it on
the following day in Columbia’s Thirtieth Street studio.
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rick simeone
(Rick Simeone)
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