Feldman reviews

Encounter (Igor Levit)

Igor Levit (piano) (Sony Classical)
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Feldman: Coptic Light; String Quartet and Orchestra

Arditti Quartet; ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, et al (Capriccio)
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Feldman: For Bunita Marcus

Aki Takahashi (piano) (Mode mode)
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Feldman: Patterns in a Chromatic Field

Mathis Mayr (cello), Antonis Anissegos (piano) (Wergo)
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Steven Osborne performs works for Piano by Crumb and Feldman

Steven Osborne’s previous successful recordings of late Stravinsky and Messiaen have arguably been good preparation for both Feldman and Crumb. Still, at first blush, this seems a rather odd combination. While both are American composers who established themselves more or less in the same decades of the late 20th century, there are some striking differences.

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Ivan Ilić interprets Morton Feldman's piece 'For Bunita Marcus'

Ilić offers an exquisitely poised and expressive rendering of For Bunita Marcus
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BA Zimmerman, Feldman, Schoenberg, Xenakis: Feldman: Spring of Chosroes; BA Zimmermann: Violin Sonata; Schoenberg: Phantasy, Op. 47; Xenakis: Dikhthas

From mythical Persian rugs to uncertainty theory, this programme displays the variety of ways in which composers have approached works for violin and piano in the 20th century.

It is a disc that balances extremes: the hushed chill of Feldman’s Spring of Chosroes with the excess of Xenakis’s frenetic Dikhthas; the austerity of Schoenberg with the ebullience of BA Zimmerman, though the lack of middle ground means this is a collection of works some listeners will find hard to love. 

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BA Zimmermann, Feldman, Schoenberg, Xenakis: BA Zimmermann: Violin Sonata; Schoenberg: Phantasy, Op. 47; Xenakis: Dikhthas

From mythical Persian rugs to uncertainty theory, this programme displays the variety of ways in which composers have approached works for violin and piano in the 20th century.
 
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Arvo Pärt, Barry Guy, Elizabeth Liddle, Ivan Moody, James MacMillan, Joanne Malf, Michael Finnissy & John Casken, Morton Feldman, Paul Robinson, Piers Hellawell, Veljo Tormis: Works by Barry Guy, Morton Feldman, Ivan Moody, Piers Hellawell, Paul Robinson,

The four voices of the Hilliard Ensemble – countertenor, two tenors and baritone – sound uniquely themselves whether in medieval or contemporary music. The 12 composers featured on this double album provide a rich variety of invention that through its fascinating amalgam of past and present promises further treasure to come.

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Arvo Pärt, Barry Guy, Elizabeth Liddle, Ivan Moody, James MacMillan, Joanne Malf, Michael Finnissy & John Casken, Morton Feldman, Paul Robinson, Piers Hellawell, Veljo Tormis: Works by Barry Guy, Morton Feldman, Ivan Moody, Piers Hellawell, Paul Robinson,

The four voices of the Hilliard Ensemble – countertenor, two tenors and baritone – sound uniquely themselves whether in medieval or contemporary music. The 12 composers featured on this double album provide a rich variety of invention that through its fascinating amalgam of past and present promises further treasure to come.

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Feldman: Untitled Composition for cello and piano

In his last ten years (he died in 1987), Morton Feldman honed to perfection the main characteristics of his musical language: low dynamics, slow tempi, extended time-spans, sparse quasi-patterns of sound that seem to drift through space. In compositions such as Crippled Symmetry and For Philip Guston (both available on a Swiss label with the rather unlikely name of hat ART) the effect is hypnotically restful: an abstract sonic dreamscape that comes close to evoking serenity.
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Steve Reich, Glyn Perrin, Walter Zimmermann, Tom Johnson, Morton Feldman, Christopher Fox, Gavin Bryars And Ennio Morricone

Roger Heaton’s collection of contemporary music for clarinets comprises works by eight leading composers, all written within the last 15 years, including two which were specially composed for this disc. The music is stylistically varied, ranging from the one-and-a-half-minute Rational Melody No. 1 by Tom Johnson, a repeated six-note melody played by a solo bass clarinet, to the large-scale ensemble works of Steve Reich and Gavin Bryars.

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Feldman: Piano and Orchestra; Cello and Orchestra; Coptic Light

There is something endearing about Michael Tilson Thomas’s championing of Morton Feldman’s music, and there is also quite a bit that is extraordinary about the performances the conductor obtains from his New World Symphony. True, the three scores that receive their world premiere recordings here do not exactly call for orchestral bravura: this is quiet, contemplative stuff. But Feldman, that improbable Zen master from Brooklyn, could not ask for more persuasive sounds than those made by these young musicians from Miami.
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Feldman: Atlantis; String Quartet & Orchestra; Oboe & Orchestra

The small Swiss label Hat Hut has long been among the foremost champions of Morton Feldman’s music. Nearly a dozen Feldman titles have appeared on the label over the last decade, including acclaimed premiere recordings of late chamber epics like the three-hour For Christian Wolff and the four-hour For Philip Guston. The works on this CD are more modest in scale and come from earlier periods in Feldman’s career.
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Feldman: For Frank O'Hara; Bass Clarinet and Percussion; De Kooning; Instruments I

Morton Feldman admired his friend Frank O’Hara for writing poetry that ‘dispenses with everything... but his feelings’. Given the placid surfaces of Feldman’s music, this emphasis on feeling may seem curious but, as the critic Kyle Gann has noted, it was Feldman who reaffirmed the value of intuition when his new music colleagues became obsessed with systems in the Sixties.
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Feldman: For Samuel Beckett

Morton Feldman’s late works are generally very quiet, very slow and very long. Crippled Symmetry (1983) and For Samuel Beckett (1987) share these attributes, yet remain strikingly different pieces. Crippled Symmetry takes its title and its structural methodology from Feldman’s interest in Near and Middle Eastern rug-making, where the symmetry of the patterns is ‘crippled’ by slight variations in the execution of the details.
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Feldman: Crippled Symmetry

Morton Feldman’s late works are generally very quiet, very slow and very long. Crippled Symmetry (1983) and For Samuel Beckett (1987) share these attributes, yet remain strikingly different pieces. Crippled Symmetry takes its title and its structural methodology from Feldman’s interest in Near and Middle Eastern rug-making, where the symmetry of the patterns is ‘crippled’ by slight variations in the execution of the details.
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Feldman: For Samuel Beckett

Morton Feldman’s late works are generally very quiet, very slow and very long. Crippled Symmetry (1983) and For Samuel Beckett (1987) share these attributes, yet remain strikingly different pieces. Crippled Symmetry takes its title and its structural methodology from Feldman’s interest in Near and Middle Eastern rug-making, where the symmetry of the patterns is ‘crippled’ by slight variations in the execution of the details.
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Feldman, Wolpe

Hard to believe the young Feldman studied for several years with Stefan Wolpe, their musics on this CD sound so different. It was Wolpe too who introduced Feldman to the Abstract Expressionist painting that later became an aesthetic model for much of his music. Wolpe, a Jewish Marxist from Berlin, had fled from the Nazis in 1933, moving first to Vienna (where he studied with Webern), then to Palestine and finally, in 1938, to the USA. Though acknowledged as an influential teacher in the States, his music remains little-known. The two works here uphold his political allegiances.
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Feldman: Durations II; Piano and Orchestra; Rothko Chapel

Col Legno’s Collage series is rapidly developing into an important documentary archive for music from the second half of the 20th century. Pride of place in the latest batch goes to the Boulez disc, a collection of world premiere performances. The Tombeau à la mémoire du Prince Max Egon zu Fürstenberg was the 1959 draft of what ultimately became the finale of the masterpiece Pli selon pli, while Polyphonie X from 1951 and Poésie pour pouvoir (1958) are two works with almost mythical status in the Boulez canon; both of them were performed once only before being withdrawn.
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Feldman: The Straits of Magellan; Two Pieces for Six Instruments; Projections; Durations

This disc of Feldman’s early music includes his first graphic scores, Projections 1-5 (1950-51), together with some of his other experiments in notated indeterminacy. In the Projections set, Feldman employs symbols to indicate range of register (high, middle, low) while leaving specific pitch choices open to the performers. In Durations 1-5 (1960), he uses staff notation and specifies pitch but allows the performers to proceed at their own, individually-chosen paces within a general tempo designation (slow, very slow, etc).
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Feldman: Piano and Orchestra; Palais de Mari; Piano

Feldman’s solo piano works represent an important part of his oeuvre, particularly late epics like Triadic Memories (1981) and For Bunito Marcus (1985). Marcus, a former student of Feldman’s, commissioned Palais de Mari (1986), his last work for solo piano, and a masterpiece. She requested he make it just ten minutes long, knowing it would be twice that. In fact, performances tend to last 25-30 minutes, and Ronnie Lynn Patterson stretches it to 40. It’s a lovely piece, Feldman’s gentle, mesmerising lyricism stripped bare, a delicate trickling of notes through the silence.
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Feldman: Piano; Palais de Mari

Feldman’s solo piano works represent an important part of his oeuvre, particularly late epics like Triadic Memories (1981) and For Bunito Marcus (1985). Marcus, a former student of Feldman’s, commissioned Palais de Mari (1986), his last work for solo piano, and a masterpiece. She requested he make it just ten minutes long, knowing it would be twice that. In fact, performances tend to last 25-30 minutes, and Ronnie Lynn Patterson stretches it to 40. It’s a lovely piece, Feldman’s gentle, mesmerising lyricism stripped bare, a delicate trickling of notes through the silence.
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Feldman: Piano and String Quartet

Morton Feldman once called the string quartet ‘the pinnacle of Western music’, and his long-term interest in the genre certainly flourished in his later years. His 1979 String Quartet was followed first by his epic, five-hour String Quartet II (1983) and then by a series of works for solo instrument and string quartet, including ones with clarinet (1983), violin (1985) and piano (1985).
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