The first concert in the 2019-2020 season of Ligeti Ensemble features works by two greats of American modernist composition, Elliott Carter and Charles Ives. Carter, who lived to the grand age of 103, was still composing in the final year of his life: the world premiere of Two Controversies and a Conversation was arranged in New York’s Metropolitan Museum in 2012. Dialogue is one of the key expressions of the pocket-size double concerto scored for solo piano and percussion, with chamber accompaniment, just like the Clarinet Concerto (1996), written for the 20th anniversary of Ensemble InterContemporain: Pierre Boulez conducted the seven-movement work at its debut. Charles Ives, demigod of American music and the person who encouraged Carter early in his career, composed Symphony No. 3 in the first decade of last century, but although there is a story that Gustav Mahler, who was then working in America, showed particular interest in the work, the premiere only took place nearly four decades later, in 1946. True, the master did then find his patience fully rewarded: the three-movement symphony immediately collected a Pulitzer Prize for Music.