Superb review of the Carter, Steve. I must take issue with your final graph, however. This does not so much feel like the music of our age as it does a throwback to a different era, and a much darker one at that. When Carter and his ilk were ruling academia and contemporary-music programming, any composer who wrote music that was tonal or melodic was branded as old-fashioned and out of step. It was a big, macho, atonal cabal and newspaper critics and academics slavishly went along with it. Thankfully those days are over and audiences don’t have to always suffer when orchestras trot out the token new work. Don’t let Carter’s genial “grand old man” status fool you, there’s NO hunger among mainstream audiences for a return to the days when his style of music dominated.