It is a rare composer who lives to see his own centenary, but Elliott Carter seems determined to do so, and at the rate he’s going, he might just write a new piece for the occasion. At 95, Carter is more prolific now than at any time in his long career, and he may well be the last great figure of the long-abandoned modernist movement. “His dogged refusal to bend to the whims of the culture around him makes him a strangely isolated figure in Manhattan. His music is performed much more often in Europe than in America – his only opera, composed in 1998, has never been staged in the US – and he finds himself at odds with the compositional trends that have come and gone in New York.”