Elliott Carter's 100th birthday took place last Thursday and was marked, among myriad ways, by a concert at Carnegie Hall, and the celebration continues. The centerpiece of the Carnegie program, performed by pianist Daniel Barenboim and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, led by James Levine, was Interventions, a new piece by the now-centenarian composer. Los Angeles Times music critic Mark Swed writes in his review of the event:

The world has never known such an artist, one who has reached 100 prolifically making vibrant work for which the wisdom of experience is employed to produce new sensations. History has been made before in Carnegie Hall and centenaries of great composers celebrated, but Thursday’s concert was a first.

The program included works by Schubert and Beethoven, and Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. The following night, the celebration continued, when Levine made his Newark New Jersey Performing Arts Center debut, and he and the BSO paired Rite and Beethoven's Seventh Symphony with Carter's Horn Concerto, "another piece from Carter's unprecedented Indian summer," writes the Star-Ledger's Bradley Bambarger.

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Birthday festivities were taking place across the Atlantic as well, most prominently in Queen Elizabeth Hall at London's Southbank Centre, in performances by the Ensemble Intercontemporain, led by Pierre Boulez and featuring clarinetist Alain Damiens and pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard. In a five-star review of the Carter concert and the ensemble's previous night celebration of Messiaen's 100th, The Times (UK)'s Richard Morrison exclaims that performances "must be ranked as one of the musical highs of 2008."

Says Morrison, "The virtuoso precision of the playing was as astonishing as the vaulting ambition of the programmes," which included Carter's Caténaires, Dialogues, Intermittences, Clarinet Concerto, and the UK premiere of Matribute.

Of Aimard's performance in the Carter program, the reviewer writes:

He was brilliant in the tempestuous solo part in Dialogues—virtually a punch-up between piano and orchestra for control of the sound waves—then returned to play three monstrously difficult solo piano pieces, including the whooshing perpetual-motion single line of Caténaires.

Even more astounding, says Morrison, was Damiens performance of Carter's Clarinet Concerto:

The piece requires the soloist to move between different instrumental groups, each of which draws out of him a different sort of music while the others offer interaction and interruption. Like all of Carter's finest music, the excitement comes from the myriad ways in which his astringent contrapuntal lines tangle and clash.

Read the full review at entertainment.timesonline.co.uk.