Elliott Carter, Netherlands Radio Chamber Orchestra, Peter Eötvös

What Next? is the only opera by Elliott Carter, written in 1997 and 1998 when he was approaching ninety, with a libretto by the British critic and novelist Paul Griffiths. This disc brought the first recordings of the opera and of the Asko Concerto, and it was released by ECM New Series in November 2003, a month before the composer's 95th birthday. Far from the usual idea of a late work, the music is quick, witty and full of energy.

The opera was commissioned by Daniel Barenboim and first staged in Berlin in 1999. This recording comes from a live concert performance at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam on 9 September 2000, with Peter Eötvös conducting the Netherlands Radio Chamber Orchestra. The cast includes Valdine Anderson and Sarah Leonard (sopranos), Hilary Summers (contralto), and others, among them a boy alto. The Asko Concerto followed in September 2001 at MCO Studio 5 in Hilversum. Manfred Eicher was executive producer, and the booklet carries notes by Carter, Griffiths and David Hamilton.

The action follows a car crash, an idea Carter took from Jacques Tati's film Trafic. Six survivors, five adults and a child, crawl from the wreckage and try to work out who they are to each other and where they were going. Mama insists they were all on the way to her son's wedding, the guru Zen is her former husband, and the astronomer Stella is his new partner. The music starts from a percussive crash and a single stuttering syllable, and the voices then move through solos, duets and ensembles over a small orchestra with a large percussion section. At its centre the characters leave the stage for a slow, soft interlude. The twelve-minute Asko Concerto was written in January 2000 for the Dutch Asko Ensemble. It splits sixteen players into two trios, two duos, a quintet and a solo, framed by the full group.

Critics took the record seriously. In The Guardian, Andrew Clements called the orchestral writing "a typical late Carter web of glistening instrumental lines" and found it "exquisite". Paul Driver wrote in the Sunday Times that the opera "is one of the most original operas I know". Reviewers also praised the libretto, which plays with words, memory and operatic convention as much as with the plot.

This is the CD edition, ECM New Series 1817, first released in 2003, with a booklet containing the complete libretto and Griffiths's journal of the opera.