Nationality apart, Elliott Carter and John Adams have precious little in common, and the juxtaposition of their music on a single disc at first glance seems unlikely. The connecting thread is pianist Ursula Oppens, who has been closely involved with major works by both composers in recent years. Certainly her commitment to the two most substantial items in this all-American recital, Carter's Night Fantasies and Adams's Phrygian Gates, is never in doubt—a powerful advocacy which she extends to the level of claiming them as ''the two major piano pieces of the last ten years'' and ''the anchors of the literature''.
It is a bold view, and not one that everybody will share. Of the two works, Night Fantasies has by far the stronger claim to fame and survival. It is a work of unremitting toughness: tough on the listener, tough on the player. Oppens joined forces with three other major American pianists in commissioning it, and she is the third of the four to perform it on record. Another version, played with authority by the young Aleck Karis, also made a brief appearance in the catalogue on Bridge, though this has already been deleted. What other work in the contemporary piano repertory can claim such dedicated attention? Without the recordings of Charles Rosen or Paul Jacobs available here for comparison, it would be premature to comment on the particular merits of Oppens's view of the work; but Night Fantasies is not a piece any pianist will take on lightly, and the granite toughness of her playing certainly shows up the monolithic structure and rugged features of Carter's score in sharp detail.
Beside this, Phrygian Gates seems a mere trifle. It dates from 1978, the same year as Adams's widely acclaimed string sextet Shaker Loops, which it accompanies on an earlier American 1750 Arch Records recording (not generally available), played by dedicatee Mack McCray. Although the two works are closely related, Phrygian Gates lacks both the positive ideas and alluring textures of the sextet; not even the tightness of its form and the intriguing modal structure that gives the work its name are enough to counterbalance the improvisatory character and shortage of musical substance. Of the two performances McCray's is marginally preferable, with its brighter recorded sound and quirkier attention to local detail; but it is the music, not the interpretation, that ultimately counts.
As if to keep Carter and Adams at arm's length from one another, Oppens cocoons her two highlights in a selection of modern American tangos from the set commissioned by Yvar Mikhashoff in 1983. Wisely, she opens with Conlon Nancarrow's splendidly jagged, bluesy contribution, utterly characteristic in its polyrhythmic confusion, and closes with another strong piece, David Jaggard's Tango, in which the Latin-American vocabulary of the tango genre stubbornly refuses to connect into a real dance. The other pieces frankly contribute little—except perhaps further to underline the sheer monumentality of the Carter, compared with almost everything else around it.'