At Tanglewood, a modernist oasis

The generously proportioned ground level of Ozawa Hall remained near-full, night after night, and by midweek, a surreal feeling began to set in, as if, while everyone was sleeping, someone had re-scripted the narrative of high-modernism and suddenly this intensely difficult music had a genuine public. The audience seemed to include a healthy proportion of music students but also a motley assortment of new-music fans and connoisseurs of complexity gathered from near and far. Strangers traded enthusiasms about jagged chamber works; one man announced he had driven five hours to get there. For this one week, Tanglewood became an oasis of challenging art. You almost expected to find the ushers toting copies of "Finnegans Wake."

The festival had been in the works for some two years, directed by James Levine, who regrettably had to miss the entire affair as he recovered from surgery to remove a kidney. A bevy of conductors stepped in to fill his shoes, their ranks headed by festival adviser and longtime Carter champion Oliver Knussen. The performers included some stalwart Carter acolytes such as pianists Charles Rosen and Ursula Oppens, but mostly they were young TMC fellows barely one-fifth Carter's age and yet astonishingly fluent in his musical idiom.

Carter began his career as a composer of neo-classical music of a more populist inclination but, starting in the late 1940s, he painstakingly reinvented himself as a vanguard modernist and a creator of works that combined a ferocious technical complexity with a remarkably vivid if also highly fractured sense of theater. One signature Carter move became the freeing of individual lines within an ensemble or an orchestra, such that a piece could be built from multiple streams of music that were each obeying a different tempo.