Atonal Prism

Composer Elliott Carter, a Burgess Meredith lookalike, also happens to have a strong sense of theater, more so in fact than most nonoperatic composers. Carter, 64, a master American modernist, likes to think of his orchestral and chamber-music scores as auditory scenarios that are designed to give each performer the freedom and individuality of an Olivier or, at the very least, a George C. Scott.

For his String Quartet No. 2, winner of the 1960 Pulitzer Prize, Carter stationed each musician in a different quarter of the stage. That arrangement produced a musical conversation almost Joycean in its plural textures. At one point in his 1970 Concerto for Orchestra, Carter wrote different music for each member of the cello section, causing even more cacophonous grumbling among the musicians than among their instruments.

In his new String Quartet No. 3, Carter goes one step further. In the world premiere last week at Manhattan's Lincoln Center, the Juilliard Quartet paired off into duos and engaged in a 20-minute adventure in the attraction of opposites. While Duo II (violin and viola) was playing six movements in the strictest of tempos, Duo I (violin and cello) was playing four movements in a very free rubato style. Happily, the two duos not only began but end ed together, proving that being at sixes and fours is not at all like being at sixes and sevens.

Like all Carter's music -- save for his early Eight Etudes and a Fantasy -- the Quartet is music of mind-numbing difficulty. It is practically impossible to hum or whistle, and almost impossible to play. Experiencing the drama of its dense inner layers and illusory sur faces -- superbly captured by the Juilliard -- is like viewing late Beethoven through an atonal prism. The power is there. So is the higher mathematics of Carter's intricate organizational scheme. As to deep feeling, and perhaps something of lovability, only time and richer acquaintance will tell.

Like Beethoven, Mahler and other musical visionaries, Carter is convinced that time will tell well. Only in the past season or two, for example, has he begun to hear performances (by Sir Georg Solti and the Chicago Sympho ny) of his 17-year-old Variations for Orchestra that have pleased him -- and audiences. By rights, the String Quartet No. 3 should not have to wait that long.

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