‘In Sleep, in Thunder’: Elliott Carter'S Portrait of Robert Lowell

Extract

Elliott Carter's new work for the London Sinfonietta, In Sleep, In Thunder, is a setting of six poems by Robert Lowell scored for tenor and fourteen instrumentalists and composed ‘in memory of the poet and friend’. With it Carter completes a triptych on contemporary American poetry that began with A Mirror on Which to Dwell (six poems of Elizabeth Bishop) and continued with Syringa, on the poem of that name by John Ashbery. Since Lowell himself suggested to the composer the initial choice of Elizabeth Bishop's poetry it seems appropriate that Lowell should receive a parallel (though posthumous) tribute.