Holiday Overture (1944)

For the first installment of its Carter series...Lorin Maazel led the HOLIDAY OVERTURE, as uncharacteristic a score as you will find in the Carter catalog. Long stretches of the HOLIDAY OVERTURE could pass for music of Copland...Yet that's not all there is to this piece... After the jaunty woodwind lines and fold-accented string themes that hold the spotlight for the first half of the work, Carter begins to push against the expectations the music has created. Competing and almost incompatible figures nudge one another with an Ivesian impishness. And in the score's final pages, the pileup of brass and percussion textures gives the music a dark hue and spikiness that - if by no means full-fledged Carter - take the piece a world away from its innocently celebratory opening.