Morton Feldman - String Quartet (1994)

From zen for piano last Friday, to zen for strings today.  The last decade of Morton Feldman's life saw him turn to mostly chamber music, hushed dynamics, and increasingly lengthy works.  String Quartet was written in 1979, and recorded for the first time in January 1993 by The Group For Contemporary Music.  The piece might have filled an entire CD with a minute to spare, but it's still about four and a half hours shorter than Feldman's String Quartet II.  One to get lost in for sure, as glowing pulses of sound are occasionally broken up by choppier timbres, and Feldman's modular form of writing periodically reprises little figures with subtle development.

Alternate cover (Naxos reissue, 2006)

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pw: sgtg

Previously posted at SGTG:
Piano and String Quartet
Durations/Coptic Light
Rothko Chapel
Two short pieces on Extended Voices

Morton Feldman - Durations I-V / Coptic Light (1992/4 recordings, rel. '97)

More Morton, for those who enjoyed Rothko Chapel the other week.  This collection pairs Ensemble Avantgarde's 1994 rendition of Feldman's 1960/1 chamber suite Durations I-V with one of his most striking late works for orchestra, Coptic Light (1986), performed here by the German Symphony Orchestra of Berlin.  It was actually the latter that I originally got this CD for, after listening to a different version online and being captivated by the mysterious, flowing sounds of this 24-minute piece of music that sounded like it was emanating from the depths of an ocean, with distant glimmers of light piercing the murky depths.  Feldman's inspiration for Coptic Light was actually the pattern of an ancient carpet, but its subaquatic qualities often get mentioned.

The Durations suite was completely new to me, and took a while to get in to, but I love it now.  The performers (on various combinations of piano, harp, violin, cello, horn, tuba, vibraphone, celesta and flute) follow a score with no duration indications on the notes, leaving this up to the performers and always resulting in a unique performance.  Durations sounds to me like music from another world with an alien conception of time - much like that other late Feldman work that I love, for piano and string quartet (link below) - and perhaps a heavier gravitational pull, especially on the four sections of Durations III, which do have overall tempo indications, mostly 'slow' and 'very slow'.  Take time out of time to enjoy this album - it's a perfect wind-down.

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Previously posted at SGTG: Rothko Chapel | Piano & String Quartet

Kim Kashkashian, Sarah Rothenberg, Houston Chamber Choir - Rothko Chapel (2015)

This album came up in the comments a short while back, so as promised, here it is.  Asked to curate a programme of music for a 40th anniversary concert at Rothko Chapel in 2011, Sarah Rothenberg, pianist and leader of the Da Camera organisation for chamber music in Houston, TX, chose to frame Morton Feldman's unique Rothko-inspired work with pieces by John Cage and Erik Satie.

The connection, Rothenberg explains in her lengthy liner note to this collection of 2012-13 recordings of the pieces in the programme, was that the three composers 'form a triumvirate of original creators who were each closely tied to the visual art of their time'.  And besides that, on this ECM New Series CD the programme just sounds great as a flowing, 70-minute immersion in some unique, inspired music.

Feldman's Rothko Chapel, written in tribute to the painter's great work just after his death, is the obvious opener to this collection.  Its sombre, eerie choral drift, piano backdrop and viola lead remain the perfect musical expression of Rothko's diffuse hints of colour on black backgrounds that graced the inner walls of the Houston chapel.

The remainder of the programme alternates between Rothenberg on solo piano playing inspired choices from Satie's Gnossiennes and Ogives, and the Houston Chamber Choir performing works by John Cage.  I hadn't heard any choral work by Cage prior to this disc, and the pieces here, Four², ear for EAR and Five, sit really well with the main Feldman work.  The programme closes with one of Cage's finest piano pieces, In A Landscape.

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Morton Feldman - Piano and String Quartet (1985, rec. 2011)

After all that excitement, let's take the tempo down... right dooowwwwwnnnn.  Morton Feldman's late work in particular is an acquired taste, and it really takes work to adjust your brain to take it in.  If a normal album or even a regular symphony is like watching a river flow past, or like crashing waves, music like this is akin to watching an Arctic glacier for signs of movement.

I had already heard the Kronos Quartet/Aki Takahashi recording (1993) of Piano and String Quartet some time ago, but on buying this 2011 disc by the Eclipse Quartet last year I've found it much more satisfying.  Just 80 minutes of pensive piano lines and pointilistic strings to get lost in, or to do the washing up to - the latter being part of my first experience of the Kronos version.

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Brandeis University Chamber Chorus - Extended Voices (1967)

This is from the same box set as the Pierre Boulez disc from last week, a great 10-CD collection of some of the greatest music of the 20th-century avant garde, from long-out-of-print CBS & RCA LPs spanning approximately 1964-1974.  One of the best £12 I spent last year.

Extended Voices was originally released in 1967, with The Brandeis University Chamber Chorus performing pieces by six avant-garde composers under the direction/sonic manipulation of composer Alvin Lucier.  All of these recordings are worth taking in for their sheer uniqueness and groundbreaking use of sound and technology, making Extended Voices an effective album experience that fascinates throughout.

After an okay start (there's much better Pauline Oliveros works out there to discover), the two long pieces on Side One are particularly mindblowing, with scraps of speech and vocalisation flying around everywhere and being mangled by the electronic treatments. On Side Two, Robert Ashley's 'She Was A Visitor' is the epilogue to a rarely-performed opera-of-sorts, which is really worth reading up on in context.  The two brief Morton Feldman pieces that close out Extended Voices are worth the entry price as well, being hauntingly produced by Lucier for this release.

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