Morton Feldman
For John Cage and Piano and String Quartet
Several lifetimes ago, when I was nineteen, I was interviewed by Wilfrid Mellers for a place at York University. That I failed to win a place may have been due in part to the confinement of our discussions to the music of Morton Feldman. Wilfrid (a friend of Feldman’s and, in later years, a friend of mine) saw Debussy as a powerful influence. My own view was that Feldman’s music was much closer to the cool jazz of the Forties and Fifties. My guess is that Feldman would have supported Wilfrid’s argument and been dismissive of mine.
Well, my crazy notion won a new lease of life recently when I read John Fordham’s Guardian obituary of George Russell, jazz drummer, composer and theoretician, who not only had worked with Miles Davis and Gerry Mulligan but had studied with Stefan Wolpe, Feldman’s teacher at the same time. One wonders whether Russell and Feldman knew each other. Russell published The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organisation in 1953 and I strongly suspect that this Lydian concept is not a million miles (no pun intended!) from Feldman’s harmony which remains powerfully, uncompromisingly ineffable.
One senses a connection to jazz in Feldman’s subtly emotive chords. And beyond that, in the music’s “touch” and “swing”. The touch is in the minimising of attack (Baroque bows are used on this recording). The swing is in the rhythmic dislocation, a feature from the beginning but pursued most exhaustively in the long works of the last years, For John Cage being a prime example.
The only problem with genre is that we cannot wish it away. If Cage spent his life beating his head against the wall of harmony, Feldman preferred to dwell on thresholds, exploring limits and intersections, as Samuel Beckett did in Neither, the libretto he wrote for Feldman.
The personal character of these notes seems appropriate. Feldman was close to the Abstract Expressionists. He worked intuitively, and the Abstract Experience of his music is subjective. George Russell studied structure with Wolpe, but Feldman had no time for structure. He had time in the end only for the manipulation of time (as in For John Cage) or for the observation of time as it slipped through his fingers (as in Piano and String Quartet). These pieces exist at the intersection of the everyday and the transcendent. Piano and String Quartet is like breathing; and like dying. The matter is of life and death.
Howard Skempton 2009
Feldman for Strings
Much has been written (including by John Tilbury) on approaches to playing Feldman though not necessarily from the perspective of string players. In our approach to these works The Smith Quartet and John Tilbury considered three key aspects: sonority, articulation and their unusually lengthy durations.
When many of these pieces were first performed, Feldman requested that the string players use ‘leather mutes’. However we now have very light and excellent plastic practice mutes available to the same effect, more reliable and easier to use. Another score marking employed by Feldman is an instruction to have the hair on the bows as loose as possible, the aim being that, since the majority of his work is incredibly quiet this is the easiest way to create this dynamic. Ironically, with the resurgence of period performance and easy access to baroque bows, we have performed and recorded this repertoire with these bows. The benefits are multiple and, most importantly for us, the lightness of these bows helps both physically in playing music that can routinely be 80 minutes in length, and musically as their arc-like shape lends well to the wonderful melodic and harmonic contours of Feldman’s string writing.
The violinist Paul Zukofsky (one of my musical mentors), was a close personal collaborator and dedicatee of Feldman’s music for violin. He speaks of the ‘emotional’ difference in Feldman’s notation; for example, between an Eb & D# and now having played these works many times one can truly feel the intensity of difference between these notes. Together we have uncovered the subtle nuances of colour, imaginatively and technically, to convey these differences.
For us, in performing and recording these pieces, we felt that a ‘vibrato free’ style of playing created a type of musical purity akin to Feldman’s own intentions. Of course this also complements John Tilbury’s delicate pianistic touch.
In the score of both these pieces the dynamic indication ppp (extremely soft) is given. We suggest that you adjust your volume control accordingly.
Darragh Morgan
Noel Forster (1932–2007) – an appreciation
In choosing an image by Noel Forster for the cover of this DVD, John Tilbury commemorates a long friendship with this painter, but also hints at connections that might be found with the music of Morton Feldman. In fact, we could go further and suggest a creative bond that links the piano player, painter and composer. Each could be seen as initiators of strong-willed and persistent projects: working and honing their materials and craft in the face of changing fads and fashions that have long since evaporated.
Noel Forster was born in Northumberland and studied at Newcastle University in the 1950s. By the early 1960s he had developed his characteristic procedure of working with accrued painted arcs instigated by the movement of both arms across the canvas. Forster made analogies with the music of Terry Riley, where simple repetitive patterns can construct a complex result. But we might also be reminded of Feldman—where a limited set of materials develop a potentially vast woven surface, full of richness. Within these processes Forster was interested in what he called “creative error”—whereby the trace of the body on the surface resulted in curved rather than straight units for construction. Forster’s discussion of this principle —of error, in fact, enhancing rather than hindering production—certainly influenced Gavin Bryar’s Portsmouth Sinfonia and the resulting musical experiments that ensued. His work in the early 1970s was shown at the Bern and Basel Kunsthalles and reflected growing appreciation abroad, including a residency in America. Around this time his paintings developed from monochrome to multi-chromatic works; and from a unified field to various experiments with format, cutting and interrupting the field—as in the work Painting in 6 Stages with Silk Triangle which won first prize at the Liverpool John Moores annual painting exhibition in 1978 and acquired by the Walker Art gallery in the city. Forster continued to produce and exhibit extensively until his death in 2007.
Forster remained a great admirer of John Tilbury’s piano playing and both had taught at the S.E. Technical College and School of Art (later to become Walthamstow School of Art) in the 1960s. Forster recalled that Tilbury, “held lunchtime concerts there, where the musical performance was considerably extended into the scoring of common-life behaviour.” Here, Forster is alluding to Tilbury’s championing of Christian Wolff, Cornelius Cardew and Morton Feldman—each allowing a leakage of the sounds of the environment into their work—which made a great impression on his own practice. He also recalled hearing Feldman talk at Wolverhampton art school as part of his brief tour of the UK in 1968, invited there by Tom Phillips, and was fascinated by the process of ‘decay’ that was present in Feldman’s art. Forster held Cardew in great esteem—and performed often in the latter’s Great Learning, and played the organ part in Paragraph One of that work in Portsmouth Cathedral in 1969. Forster remains one of the few British painters who managed to convincingly absorb many aspects of these ideas and yet also maintained a steady and very personal course of action. Like Feldman (we can think of his inspirational collection of woven rugs) he was captivated by the possibilities of surface and warp and weft, and constructed work with sometimes jewel-like precision, which remained—for him—not an isolated aestheticism, but revealing important connections with how we see and experience the world.
David Ryan—2009
In 2006, the Huddersfield Contemporary Music festival focused on Morton Feldman, one of the few important composers of the second half of the 20th century whose music had not previously been featured at the festival. At the centre of this belated tribute was a survey of Feldman's works for piano and strings, spread across several recitals, with pianist John Tilbury and the members of the Smith Quartet. They were extraordinary experiences, a reminder that at their finest Feldman's late works inhabit a world quite unlike that of any other composer, and this disc is the first in a planned series of three to be taken from those concerts. The recordings are presented on an audio-only DVD, which may present problems for some listeners, but does allow Feldman's timeless musical canvases to be heard as unbroken spans. Each of the works here, For John Cage from 1982, for violin and piano, and the 1985 Piano and String Quartet, lasts just under 90 minutes and each casts its own distinctive spell, spun from the slenderest music resources – a bundle of skeletal melodies, a few harmonic scraps – within a dynamic range that rarely rises beyond pianissimo.
Andrew Clements The Guardian, February 19th 2020
Morton Feldman (1926-87), one of the hallowed pioneers of 20th-century music, invented his own intuitive, subtle mode of composition, as close as music gets to abstract expressionism. In these two meditative works,'For John Cage' and 'Piano and String Quartet,' violin bows are loosened for delicacy, vibrato banished for maximum purity of sound. Because of the 90-minute duration of each piece (too long for a CD), this live recording from 2006 Huddersfield Festival has to be played on a computer with a DVD drive. Don't be deterred. Listen, reflect, marvel.
Fiona Maddocks The Observer 21st February 2010
Almost all Feldman’s music is slow and soft. Only at first sight is this a limitation. I see it rather as a narrow door, to whose dimensions one has to adapt oneself (as in Alice in Wonderland) before one can pass through it into the state of being that is expressed in Feldman’s music. Only when one has become accustomed to the dimness of light can one begin to perceive the richness and variety of colour which is the material of the music. When one has passed through the narrow door and got accustomed to the dim light, one realises the range of his imagination and the significant differences that distinguish one piece from another …
Feldman sees the sounds as reverberating endlessly, never getting lost, changing their resonances as they die away, or rather do not die away, but recede from our ears, and soft because softness is compelling, because an insidious invasion of our senses is more effective than a frontal attack. Because our ears must strain to catch the music, they must become more sensitive before they perceive the world of sound in which Feldman’s music takes place. – Cornelius Cardew(1)
I’ve mentioned many times here and elsewhere that John Tilbury is my favorite interpreter of Morton Feldman’s piano music and the piano music is my favorite of Feldman’s work. The solo piano pieces, especially his last few pieces, are masterpieces but I’d also accord such plaudits to a number of Feldman’s chamber pieces. The Music for Piano and Strings series on Matchless features a number of such pieces and the first volume begins the series incredibly strong with two of his best as well as personal favorite pieces. Feldman often used the piano in his chamber pieces, sometimes in a similar way as to the solo piano pieces, but at other times in rather different ways, using a wider variety of techniques and trading off foreground and background roles with the other instruments. To understand what I mean by this one has to consider how strings are used in these pieces.
When many of these pieces were first performed, Feldman requested that the string players use ‘leather mutes’. However we now have very light and excellent plastic practice mutes available to the same effect, more reliable and easier to use. Another score marking employed by Feldman is an instruction to have the hair on the bows as loose as possible, the aim being that, since the majority of his work is incredibly quiet this is the easiest way to create this dynamic. Ironically, with the resurgence of period performance and easy access to baroque bows, we have performed and recorded this repertoire with these bows. The benefits are multiple and, most importantly for us, the lightness of these bows helps both physically in playing music that can routinely be 80 minutes in length, and musically as their arc-like shape lends well to the wonderful melodic and harmonic contours of Feldman’s string writing. – Darragh Morgan(2)
Darragh Morgan (as well as Cardew above) describe the overall features of softness and sound orientation. For strings as we read above they play with mutes, bowes with loose hair (or Baroque bows as the Smith Quartet rather brilliantly uses) but also “For us, in performing and recording these pieces, we felt that a ‘vibrato free’ style of playing created a type of musical purity akin to Feldman’s own intentions. Of course this also complements John Tilbury’s delicate pianistic touch.“(2) These restrictions seem to be standard among all (or at least the bulk) of Feldman’s pieces for strings. Beyond this, there is how he uses the pitches from the string players, that is the harmony that he chooses to employ. It would take a far greater expert than myself to really breakdown the use of harmony in Feldman’s music but there are some interesting features that reveal themselves from purely listening to the music. When there are multiple string players Feldman utilizes them in multiple ways but one of the most common is to have all the players play as one, each generating a pitch that may form into a chord across the instruments, or they may all play the same note. Some of what he seems to be going for is microtonal, but I suspect not deliberately, more just on the slight imperfection in playing. At other times it will be as if all of the members are playing separately, each doing their own thing with sounds in various pitches coming in and out of the soundfield. In the liner notes for the recent release of Feldman’s Trio on Mode (which I wrote about here) they quote Feldman as saying over the course of a long piece you more or less go through your whole bag of tricks, you try it all and you can hear this in these pieces:
“In writing a long piece, I would make curious moves, but only for the moment. Decisions that I would never think of, say, in composing a twenty-minute composition. You want a piece to be logical? Well, you’re not going to sit down and have a ten-course meal of logic; you’re satisfied with just an hors d’oeuvre, a little logical hors d’oeuvre served to you by a famous waiter! You want a piece to be beautiful? OK, give them a moment of beauty — how much more do you need? So what happens in a long piece is that soner or later you go through the whole parameter of possiblities, and everybody’s going to get something out of it, I’m sure. The form of the piece is more like a novel — there’s plenty of time for everything.” – Morton Feldman (4)
But Feldman doesn’t go through all of the available tricks from musical history, no he goes through all of his tricks. And at times, even in a long piece he’ll severely restrict himself: in Piano and String Quartet the piano only plays arpeggios, for an hour and a half in this recording. Feldman varies the arpeggios throughout the piece, their pacing, the weight of the individual notes the space between the figures, but he’s only using one technique. Of course there is also the strings which sustain this, though they also don’t explore the entire range of his techniques for strings as he does in his String Quartet peices, no it is the interplay of these five instruments in this piece that allows for just restricted material. This for me is what really distinguishes Feldman’s chamber pieces: it is the sound of the instruments playing together, the way that he approaches that seems completely unique.
Feldman’s use of extended string techniques can blur the timbral separation between cello and violin, creating unified sonic events exploring the qualities and possibilities of the combination of instruments – for example, utilizing the resonance of the piano and the sustaining qualities and dynamic control of the strings. – Mode Records Trio page
The above quote from Mode puts so well something I’ve been struggling to describe here and as I said is really to me the essence of Feldman’s chamber work. In the pieces on this disc. The way that a note on the piano dies away and then the dry bowed violin resonates with that decaying sound. The almost organ like tones of a chord built up from all four players of the string quartet playing with that gasping sound of vibrato-less bowing, combined with soft tinkling piano notes slowly revealing themselves as the chord fades away. The Smith Quartet, whom I was not at all familiar with prior to this recording, handle these pieces incredibly well. There is the right softness, dryness of tone and commitment to Feldman’s intentions. The use of the baroque bows to elegantly solve one of Feldman’s conditions to me shows innovation and flexibility and the sonic results prove that this isn’t just for their own benefit, but is the best solution to the problem. I look forward to spending more time with this quartet, first in the rest of the Music for Piano and Strings and then exploring more of their work.
From ancient China there is a description of a vibrato technique: Remarkable is the ting-yin, where the vacillating movement of the finger should be so subtle as to be hardly noticeable. Some handbooks say that one should not move the finger at all, but let the timbre be influenced by the pulsation of the blood in the fingertips pressing the string down on the board a little more heavily than usual.
Such extreme sensitivity of touch is of the essence in a performance of Feldman’s music. In the piano pieces the depressed key is gently eased back to position to minimise the obtrusive sound of the key mechanism, time is allowed for the minutest of harmonics to resound, and at the end of the phrases fingers steal away from the keys noiselessly. – John Tilbury(1)
What more is there to say John Tilbury’s performance of Feldman? Tilbury gives his highest accolades to Cornelius Cardew and David Tudor for their performances of Feldman(1) and I certainly can’t disagree with his assessments of their performances of Feldman’s early pieces. But it is not just for the lack of them having played Feldman’s later pieces that Tilbury is the one I want to hear on these pieces. His touch, his light foot on the sustain pedal (a technique he got from Cardew(3)) his extreme sensitivity to the sound and most of all his deep commitment to these pieces are I think unrivaled. For a long time I’ve wanted to hear the chamber pieces with Tilbury tinkling the ivories and I can’t say how excited and grateful I am that Matchless is putting this set of recordings out. I recall being in Vancouver participating in a workshop with John Tilbury on Cardew’s Treatise (read about this here) and while we were sharing an elevator he was telling an anecdote about playing various Feldman chamber pieces in California. I completely forget what the point of his anecdote was but it involved the playing of For Philip Guston and my one thought at the time was “Why wasn’t this recorded, I want to hear For Philip Guston with John on the piano!”. While the Music for Piano and Strings sets won’t include all of Feldman’s chamber pieces with piano, it certainly contains a large subset of them and among these my absolute favorites.
—
For John Cage [1982] (1:31:14)
One senses a connection to jazz in Feldman’s subtly emotive chords. And beyond that, in the music’s “touch” and “swing”. The touch is in the minimising of attack (Baroque bows are used on this recording). The swing is in the rhythmic dislocation, a feature from the beginning but pursued most exhaustively in the long works of the last years, For John Cage being a prime example.
- Howard Skempton(5)
This is the third recording of For John Cage that I’ve heard and while I’ve only listen it a few times so far it has quickly become my favorite. For John Cage is scored for piano and violin and thus the piano is of utmost importance. This also is the longest version I’ve heard by far and while this never a priori means it is better in this case I think it is important. I’ve always felt that there was a sense of urgency to the piece (especially in the almost frantic seeming violin in the opening notes) from the other recordings that I have and I always assumed that was an aspect of this composition that was a bit different from much other later Feldman. But with almost twenty-five more minutes to the piece then my previous favorite version of the piece that sense of urgency becomes a lot less frantic. In fact it becomes more typical of the tensions that you find at various times in Feldman’s pieces (amongst all of his tricks as I quoted earlier). There is a variance to the dynamics in Darragh Morgan’s violin that is more superb then anyone else I’ve heard on this material. He’s always at Feldman’s famous ppp but within that dynamic seems to subtly shift the volume all of the time even within a bow stroke. It could be that this is what creates that shimmering quality to the strings that I noted earlier. Tilbury’s piano is at its most bell like here, perhaps just the smallest amount of extra pressure on the sustain adding just a bit more of a ringing character to it. The interplay between the piano and violin is fantastic in this piece, there is a section near the beginning where the piano plays two notes and the violin responds with its own pair of notes in a call and response that comes across more as two timbres of a bird call. In a later section after focusing almost completing in the far upper register of the piano and violin a single low piano key is struck and repeated and those low tone reminds us of the entire range of sound and dynamic and as played here it is so warm and fat that it is like finding a perfect garden in an arid wasteland. These moments are Feldman’s brilliance in composition and the way the sound is thanks to the incredible touch of Tilbury and Morgan not to mention the excellent recording from Sebastian Lexer.
Speaking of which Richard Pinnell (of The Watchful Ear fame) posted this on IHM a few years back:
Last year at a performance of Morton Feldman’s For John Cage piece in a church in Huddersfield a car crashed in the road immediately outside the venue entrance. The loud bang was followed by a multitude of sirens and other noise. It seemed to me that at that point the slow, gradually shifting music sped up, the momentary interruption shifting the fine balance of the musicians. For John Cage indeed…
Which of course is about this very performance! He mentioned this again to me in a recent email which sent me looking for this quote to share here. In my reply to his email I said I’d have been tempted to leave those sounds in it being For John Cage after all (which you see Richard echo a bit here) and in his reply he mentioned that Sebastian Lexer had digitally erased all evidence of this from the recording. This is certainly the case and the recording sounds amazing. I can’t say I’ve noticed the slight speed up that Richard mentions, but I did notice at one point that the space suddenly seemed flat, that is to say the natural sound of the instruments reverberating in this space seemed different then it had before. I honestly wasn’t even listening for this when I first noticed it, in fact I was reading a book and my attention suddenly shifted back to the music as it had clearly changed. Not an incredible difference and depending on people sound environment and stereo may not be too noticeable at all but I’m sure this aspect was a bit altered by scrubbing those other ambient sounds. But it is a tremendous job and I’m quite thankful that the effort was made giving us this pristine and incredible version of this piece.
Piano and String Quartet [1985] (1:29:30)
Piano and String Quartet is like breathing; and like dying. The matter is of life and death.
- Howard Skempton(5)
Piano and String Quartet begins with this series of slow arpeggios from the piano, played mostly alone and in between them various short stretches of bowing from the strings, sometimes alone other times in concert. There is more time given to this piece than the other two versions I have (Kronos at ~80′ Ives somewhat short at ~72min) though not dramatically so. But that the extra ten minutes over the Kronos version does slow things down just enough more to really emphasize aspects of the piece – these arpeggios are so spacious and the time allowed for them to decay before the strings come in really lets you hear the resonance of the piano. The piano part is entirely these sustained arpeggios at various tempos, sometimes so slow as to sound like a meandering scale or even isolated single notes. The task of the pianist is to bring these to life, to capture the way that Feldman uses repetition: clearly playing the same thing but with subtle variation so that the structure remains hidden. Mark Swed in his liner notes for the Kronos Quartet/Aki Takahashi recording of this piece puts it perfectly:
Feldman also liked to compare his long pieces to Asian rugs, for which he had a passion. Finding that the most interesting were irregular in their symmetries, he kept his patterns of chords, notes, motives or sounds carefully arrenged so that their repetitions would be reconizable as repetitions, their patterns not discernible, the memory disoriented.” (6)
There seems to almost always be a shimmering sound of this resonance interacting with the beautiful bowing. In a recent post about the Kronos Quartet I mentioned how their sound had a bit more dynamic nature to it then the version of the piece from the Ives Ensemble and I have to say the Smith Quartet also has that ethereal quality to the strings. It clearly isn’t a vibrato technique (unless it is that which is transmitted by the blood itself that Tilbury describes in the quote above) but is clearly some quality of their performance. Perhaps it comes from playing super softly at a level below with the Ives Ensemble does (which is still plenty soft) or perhaps it is subtly shift the volume in the course of a bow stroke, the slight change in pressure reverberating slightly. The strings so often play as one in this piece, the bows slowly arc out in a soft chord, then pausing briefly and then returning over the strings somehow even softer. As the sustain pedal is always pressed on the piano these gentle movements, like breathing really, always begins over this residue of the previously played arpeggio and this interaction is beautiful and endlessly fascinating.
As I reported in the aforementioned Kronos post this was the first Feldman piece I ever heard and I can’t deny that its one of my favorites. Pretty much for the reasons I’ve given above: the piano and the way its used contrasting with the way Feldman uses strings, is just so compelling to me. It’ll take a lot of listens before this approaches the amount I’ve given to the Kronos and Ives versions but the piano is so glorious and the strings are as good as any I’ve heard. This easily catapults right to the top of my favorite recordings of this piece, though the Kronos/Takahashi version is right up there (Feldman more or less wrote the piece with them in mind, it certainly can be thought of as the reference version). This recording I think will reveal how wonderful this piece is to those who may not have previously been as taken with it as it aptly demonstrates this as one of Feldman’s major compositions.
—
This DVD is a real bounty, it would be akin to two double CD sets of music. While initially I was somewhat resistant to getting music on DVD I have to say I really love hearing the pieces uninterrupted. On this disc the pieces were recorded at DAT quality (48kz/24bit) and while they sound really good, they do not quite approach the amazing sound of the recently reviewed Mode Trio disc which was recorded at DVD-Audio quality (96khz/24bit) as well as in surround. No complaints really from me, these sound superb and I for one am not setup for surround sound anyway. The downside of DVD releases for me is that I like to put Feldman on as I go to sleep and I am not equipped to play Feldman in my bedroom. Maybe when I get a Blu-Ray player for the living room I’ll put my old DVD player in the bedroom. Anyway this release is essential for all aficionados of Morton Feldman, John Tilbury, the Smith Quartet or just stunningly wonderful music. My highest recommendation.
Sources
1) On Playing Feldman, by John Tilbury from the For Bunita Marcus liner notes. LondonHALL, 1993
2) Feldman for Strings by Darragh Morgan, from the Music for Piano and Strings liner notes. Matchless Recordings 2010
3) Cornelius Cardew – A Life Unfinished by John Tilbury. Copula, 2008
4) Trio liner notes by Sabine Feisst. Mode Records 2010
5) Liner notes by Howard Skempton, from the Music for Piano and Strings liner notes. Matchless Recordings 2010
6) Morton Feldman Piano and String Quartet performed by the Kronos Quartet with Aki Takehashi, Liner notes by Marc Swed 199.
http://www.spiralcage.com/blog/?tag=morton-feldman February 2010
Feldman: Music for Piano and Strings, Volume 1:
For John Cage1; Piano and String Quartet.
The Smith Quartet (Ian Humphries, 1Darragh Morgan, vlns; Nic
Pendlebury, vla; Deirdre Cooper, vlc) with John Tilbury
(pno).
Matchless Recordings MRDVD-01.
It is important, first of all, to note that this release is a DVD that can be played only on a DVD player or a computer with a DVD drive. The playing time is some three hours (2:58:31). The DVD is not quite sound-only, in that images are used for the menu and the first 25 seconds of each track.
The recordings are taken live from the 2006 Huddersfield Festival (which focused on Feldman’s music). There are two more issues to follow: Volume 2 will feature Patterns in a Chromatic Field (1981) and Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello (1987) while the third volume will feature eight pieces, including The Viola in My Life (1970). All performances originate from the same festival.
Both of the works on Volume 1 last just under 90 minutes. For John Cage (1982) is scored for violinand piano. John Tilbury’s incredibly subtle, understated pianism seems ideal for these scores (in addition to his superb playing, readers will surely be familiar with Tilbury’s major book, Cornelius Cardew, A Life Unfinished). It matches, also, the fact that the decision has been made to use baroque bows on the stringed instruments. This comes in response to Feldman’s indication to use bows with the hair as loose as possible in order to sustain low dynamics for long periods. The lightness of baroque bows also makes the music less gruelling for the player in terms of stamina, and its arc shape works well for the contours of Feldman’s own melodic shapes. The result is more than mesmeric. It speaks of an impossibly interior world, of whispered secrets. More, Darragh Morgan’s technique in For John Cage (1982) enables the high harmonics to exhibit iron security in conjunction with other-worldly fantasy.
The recording is exemplary. There seems to be no audience noise whatsoever to interrupt this most rarefied of universes. The eschewing of vibrato on the violinist’s part also aids the projection of the purity so vital to this music’s success. All credit to Morgan and Tilbury for sustaining the tension for
this extended span so creditably.
There is strong competition for this piece, notably from a performance on OgreOgress by Christina Fong and Paul Hersey. Fong is a fine string player, as her disc For Feldman (also on OgreOgress) also attests. Their performance lasts a mere 66 minutes in comparison with this one. Marc Sabat and Stephen Clarke on Mode also put forward a creditable account. In Piano and String Quartet (1985) it is Aki Takahashi and the Kronos Quartet’s revelatory, rapt account on Nonesuch that is the main rival (they take 80 minutes as opposed to the present performance’s 90). The Smith Quartet’s vibrato free approach leads to a blanched-out sound that here is more melancholy than pure. Tilbury’s playing is of the utmost delicacy. The sense of space, so evident in the Nonesuch version, is here even more entrenched – there is almost a feeling of risk in how long the gaps between statements of the prevailing arpeggio figure can last.
Howard Skempton provides the fine liner notes, and the CD can be unhesitatingly recommended.
Colin Clarke
Tempo, Volume 64, Issue 253, July 2010