Carter conceived his Piano Concerto as an 85th birthday present for Igor Stravinsky, who had been a proponent of Carter's music for some time. Written during a stay in Berlin in the mid-'60s, the concerto is a tragic, even violent, piece that fuses the composer's love of formal, rhythmic, and harmonic complexity with a deeply human sense of contemporary social and political concerns. From the opening bars it is apparent that the orchestra and soloist are in active contention with one another. The solo writing is no mere elaboration of material presented by the orchestra, as one might expect of a more traditionally cast concerto; indeed, the antagonism between the two forces is emphasized by the composer's instruction to spatially separate the piano and orchestra. There is also a third party involved, a small concertino of seven players situated directly around the piano, which functions as a hard-working, if ultimately unsuccessful, intermediary between the warring bodies. The Piano Concerto is constructed upon a principle, familiar to connoisseurs of Carter's music, which the composer borrowed from the works of his early mentor Charles Ives: several musical layers, representing different spatial, temporal, or even philosophical, planes, are presented simultaneously. Thus, the Piano Concerto is really two irreconcilably different pieces of music forced into the same temporal space; for attentive listeners, the resulting conflict is electric.

As one would expect from a modernist like Carter, the Piano Concerto's two substantial movements bear little resemblance to traditional formal plans. The work's musical material undergoes continual development, and there is no suggestion of anything like a reprise or recapitulation. The soloist, isolated behind the wall created by the concertino, presents capricious music, light and sensitive, while the orchestra lumbers along in representation of something far more menacing. Carter worked on the piece near an American weapons range; indeed, it is possible to hear a terrifying militarism in the orchestra's mechanical onslaught. There are few points of reference to previous events for either listener or performer as the work progresses, and few internal resolutions of the ongoing struggle between the soloist and the orchestra. As the concerto nears its conclusion, however, the two violently opposed forces come to something of a truce as their respective musical worlds become more complementary. In the end, however, there is no resolution, and the work closes with a lingering sense of despair.

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