Morton Feldman (1926-1987) was and remains one of the giants of the "John Cage generation" of contemporary composers (if fact, he and Cage were friends). Feldman broke free of the serial school (Babbit, Boulez, etc.) and its adherents, and found more of an influence in the detail modern painters (such as Philip Guston, for whom he wrote and named a four-hour piece). It's this sense of detail that marks Feldman's later music: how long a flutist could breathe, how long before a note from a piano decays into nothingness.
In some respects, CRIPPLED SYMMETRY is "minimalist" in that the melodic fragments are brief and repeeated, yet it sounds nothing like Philip Glass or Steve Reich. Feldman's approach recalls the spare, spacious sound of Anton Webern and the piano music of Erik Satie, with the subtle repetition forming symmetry an almost imperceptible asymmetry. This 87-minute piece, for a trio of flute, piano and percussion, is gentle though not lulling or ambient (though it may certainly achieve that effect)--there is an elemental sense of tension to it. It's as if Feldman were trying to capture the sight AND sound of a snowflake melting in slow motion. CRIPPLED SYMMETRY is powerful and demanding music, but is so quiet and unassuming you may not notice.
REVIEWS:
International Record Review (4/00, p.52) - "...Feldman deals with sound, slowing the listener's attention-span until the merest gnat's crotchet of variation registers as a...seismic shift. His figures oscillate like the visual fields created by the giant canvases of Rothko or Newman..."
Billboard (11/27/99) - Recommended

Find time to sit back and let infinity wash over you.



FELDMAN Piano and String Quartet • Vicki Ray (pn); Eclipse Qrt • BRIDGE 9369 (79:12)


Eighteen years ago I wrote a review of Morton Feldman’s Piano and String Quartet (composed in 1985) for this magazine ( Fanfare 17: 4), and today, confronted with this new performance, I find myself no closer to unraveling the music’s mysteries or explaining why I find it so mesmerizing. Feldman, inspired by the work of abstract expressionist painter friends like Philip Guston and Mark Rothko, devised a manner of composition that confounds any preconceptions of musical form and expression the listener might have. Repeating and subtly altering the voicings of an arpeggiated chord and a few small motifs between the piano and strings, the music seldom rises above a measured, soft-spoken tranquility, and continues for more than an hour and a quarter—something akin to the delicacy and close-knit harmonic fabric of an Elizabethan viol consort extended to Brucknerian scale. The phrasing occasionally takes on the pattern of breathing—in and out—or of irregular clockwork. Somehow it manages to be wistfully contemplative and aggressively engaging at the same time.


Fortunately, over the course of his career and since his passing in 1987, Feldman attracted performers committed to his vision and fluent in the unorthodox requirements of that vision—among them careful, precise attention to his signature approach to nuanced tonal inflections, pace, and ambience. In the hands of pianist Vicki Ray and the Eclipse Quartet (violinists Sarah Thornblade and Sara Parkins, violist Alma Fernandez, cellist Maggie Parkins) the music emerges with an effortless, poised continuity, and is allowed to gradually reveal its intimations of tension and repose. The premiere recording featuring the score’s dedicatees, Aki Takahashi and the Kronos Quartet (Nonesuch), presents the music with a slightly softer focus and subtly accented points of attack, but the differences become less noticeable over the length of the work. (A third recording, by the Ives Ensemble on hat Art, is currently out of print.) All in all, an admirable release.


FANFARE: Art Lange


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Morton Feldman’s Piano and String Quartet - any other composer than Feldman would simply call it a Piano Quintet and have done with it - written two years before the composer’s death, is a massive work. It’s nearly eighty minutes long and only just fits onto this CD. It is also extremely beautiful if extraordinarily slow-moving, as is most of Feldman’s late music. It opens with a series of slowly arpeggiated piano chords echoed by held strings which reminds one closely of Arvo Pärt at his most minimal. After that the music hardly changes at all during its very long duration, and one has either to accept it as background ambience – a sort of ‘accompaniment in search of a theme’ – or one must enter into its hypnotic world on the music’s own terms. There is nothing in the course of the music which disturbs the contemplative mood once it is established, and the work is a lot more extended than anything you would find even in Pärt; think of the last movement of Tabula rasa extended to four times its length!
 
There is an alternative recording by Aki Takahashi and the Kronos Quartet - the artists who originally commissioned the piece - on Elektra/Nonesuch. As a performance it is almost indistinguishable from this one: it is just 27 seconds longer, a totally insignificant difference in a work of this duration. It has a slightly mellower and more resonant acoustic which makes the music, if anything, even more ‘laid back’. As sound it may be regarded as preferable because the strings are marginally less forwardly placed, but this is purely a matter of individual taste. There is also a recording by the Ives Ensemble which is some seven minutes shorter; although I have not heard this, I would suggest that this is music which needs time to breathe, and the slower and more meditative pace of the alternative recordings is of benefit. BBC Music Magazine described that version as “earnest and clear-cut”, which would tend to reinforce my suspicions.
 
It is important to be clear what this music is not: it is not minimalist. At least if you understand that often misused word in its technical context. There is a degree of subtle change which moves the music forward throughout. So far as I can tell no single phrase is ever repeated without some such change. But what the music is is mini-textural. There are no surprises, no contrasts. Once the music begins the nature of the writing for each individual instrument undergoes an absolute minimum of metamorphosis. It is quite easy to write music like this, but it is much more difficult to make it effective. After a certain period of time there is a very real danger than the mind of the listener will ‘switch off’. Either they will find something else to do with their hands, relegating the music to a sort of background aural wallpaper, or they will find their mind wandering into other realms, be it conscious thought or contemplative meditation. That said, if you can find time to sit back and let infinity wash over you, this is the music for you. You may even find yourself wishing it were longer – and if you do, there are plenty of other late Feldman scores to enjoy, some of which are considerably longer.
 
The insert notes include a highly interesting memoir by David Lang in which he recalls incidents during the dress rehearsal in 1986 of Feldman’s Coptic Light by the New York Philharmonic. The orchestra “booed him, threw their orchestral parts around, and literally barked at him like dogs.” I can think of many other contemporary composers performed in New York during that era who would have been much more deserving of such a reception.
 
-- Paul Corfield Godfrey, MusicWeb International

Bridge's Poul Ruders Edition, Vol. 16, features the world premiere recording of a major new Ruders concerto, the seven movement "Sound and Simplicity" (2018), performed by Danish accordion virtuoso Bjarke Mogensen and the Odense Symfoniorkester, led by Sebastian Lang-Lessing. The album also includes Mogensen's transcription of Ruders's hypnotic "Dream Catcher" for solo accordion, and the re-issue of one of the Danish composer's masterpieces- his Symphony No. 3, subtitled "Dream Catcher". Ruders stands today among a handful of the world's leading composers, with operas staged in Munich, London, Copenhagen, New York, Santa Fe, and Boston, and symphonic scores commissioned by the Berlin Philharmonic, the New York Philharmonic, and the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

REVIEWS:
The Wire (p.63) - "[T]he nostalgic aura of old-time electronics, and the beauty of the playing and the pieces, has its own special appeal."

CORELLI 12 Violin Sonatas, op. 5 • Corelli Trio • BRIDGE 9371 (2 CDs: 125:34)

Here is an absolutely dazzling album that I reviewed, more or less, on a whim. Arcangelo Corelli, a fine composer who certainly introduced some innovations (those marvelous and unexpected string slides that take your breath away), wasn’t exactly a Buxtehude or a Bach, yet as this two-CD set amply proves, his music can certainly hold its own in interest and especially in charm with anyone from the Baroque era, even his fellow Italians Scarlatti and Vivaldi.

Of course, as in the case of virtually all music, the aural impact is highly dependent on the performer, and on this recording we have a truly inspired violinist in Elisabeth Zeuthen Schneider. In the booklet she is quoted as saying that Corelli’s sonatas “are an invitation to explore the most sunny and expressive voices of the violin as well as having the fun of the dancing and wild abandon of ‘La Folia’ that closes the whole set of 12 sonatas.” Further on, she makes a distinction between the church sonatas on disc 1, which she feels explore “more profound and spiritual feelings” than the chamber sonatas on disc 2, but even in those first six sonatas Schneider’s playing is sunny, singing, and full of vitality. I think that she just can’t help herself from feeling good while playing this music; I certainly couldn’t help smiling or feeling good all through the sonatas on the first disc. Schneider’s playing has that same rare combination of sweetness, elegance, charm, and sheer sunniness that one heard in the playing of Yehudi Menuhin. Also, different from most historically informed violinists, she is not averse to playing a few notes with a light vibrato, which adds piquancy and charm to her interpretations.

Moving from disc 1 to disc 2, the secular sonatas, one notices very little difference in general layout, tempos, or indeed inflection. I find Schneider’s playing no lighter, more buoyant, or infectious than on CD 1, but then again, there’s no drop-off in quality, either. She’s just plain good.

An interesting observation: All of the church sonatas are in major keys, but half of the secular sonatas are in minor, including, of course, “La Folia.” In the latter, Schneider pulls out all the stops—literally, including double-stops!—and her performance is indeed lively.

Like so many trio sonatas of this era, the accompanying instruments are just that—background to the soloist. As a result, despite the fact that they are well-trained musicians who play well, there’s really not a lot one can say about Viggo Mangor on archlute and theorbo or Ulrik Spang-Hanssen on continuo organ except that they are there, they give good support, and they keep the rhythm light.

In the booklet, it says that Corelli was a quiet man who “never devoted much time to self-promotion” and “didn’t nurse his reputation publicly in his later years.” Apparently, much the same can be said of the Corelli Trio, for although there are bios of all three musicians, there’s not a single word as to how or why they formed or call themselves “Corelli Trio”! But you certainly won’t keep their presence much of a secret once you hear this album.

FANFARE: Lynn René Bayley

This disc includes a conversation between Elliott Carter and Charles Rosen recorded in December 1996 at MasterSound Studios, Astoria, NYC (timing: 6'40").
This disc contains both DDD and ADD recordings.
"90+" was nominated for the 1999 Grammy Award for "Best Classical Contemporary Composition."
Elliot Carter has always been a composer for the cognoscenti, his music held to be well crafted and complicated. His early works are tonal and neo-classical, showing the influence of Stravinsky and teacher Nadia Boulanger. He progressed toward atonality and canonic textures, with extreme independence of voices his trademark. By the sixties when the proponents of post-serial complexity had reached the zenith of their powers in academic circles, Carter was often spoken of as America's leading composer.
The transitional Piano Sonata of 1947 is, with Ives' 'Concord Sonata' and Copland's 'Piano Variations,' an American keyboard classic. Like the latter work it is boldly declamatory and makes the most of the piano's metal with crashing sonorities and ringing harmonics. The 'Night Fantasies' of 1980 is wholly uncompromising, so difficult, one might add, that it took four pianists to commission it. There are no themes or motifs and relationships between rhythm and pitch groups are so long ranging and subtle that one could probably not discern them without careful study. Intellectual difficulty being pianist Charles Rosen's meat, he has no difficulty dispatching these works. The good analog recordings were made in Holland in 1982 and were originally released on Etcetera.
REVIEWS:
Village Voice (1/7/1998) - "...Rosen, a longtime Carter interpreter, finds the contrasts of touch and weight that pervade '90 Plus'...[in] 'Night Fantasies' [Rosen]emphasizes the [high-keyboard]dazzle...and surprising shifts...The Sonata...get[s] charming play..." Rating: A+
International Record Review (4/00) - "...As to Rosen's advocacy of [Carter's] nusic, it is both staggeringly precise and colouristically very sensitive. This recording deserves a place in the library of every musically literate person..."
Billboard (11/27/99, p.54) - Recommended

Conductor Leon Botstein has consistently offered the musical public some of the most innovative and fascinating programs to be found on today's concert stage. This album combines three orchestral works written within during the years 1926-1928, featuring Othmar Schoeck's stunning 45-minute song cycle for baritone, chorus and orchestra, "Lebendig Begraben" (Buried Alive), alongside Arthur Honegger's wildly colorful "Rugby" and Dimitri Mitropoulos's rarely heard "Concerto Grosso.” Leon Botstein is a Swiss-American Jewish conductor and scholar, and the president of Bard College. He is currently conductor of the American Symphony Orchestra and conductor laureate of the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra where he served as music director and principal conductor from 2003-2010.

The opening night of Marc Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock was one of the most infamous in history. The attempt to shut down and censor the production resulted in an improvised performance with Blitzstein playing his score on the piano, which has influenced performances of this American masterpiece for decades. Now, this First Complete Recording of The Cradle Will Rock - recorded live at Opera Saratoga in July 2017 - restores Blitzstein’s brilliant original orchestrations to their full glory. Under the baton of conductor John Mauceri and direction of Lawrence Edelson, this remarkable production of the fable of Steeltown USA, corrupted at every social level by the predations and capitalist cupidity of its boss-man, Mr. Mister, was hailed by the Philadelphia Inquirer as having “no polite veneer to soften Blitzstein’s social outrage, with a cast that had the scrupulousness of opera but the theatricality of Broadway.” Straddling the worlds of opera, musical theater and popular music, The Cradle Will Rock is as timely and entertaining today as when it first premiered in 1937.

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REVIEWS:

The music is nimble and mercurial, too, leaping from parody to poignance, from heartache to uplift, all leavened with sardonic humor. It’s good to have, at last, a well-engineered recording that does the full score — and the full scoring—justice. Of the major singers, pride of place goes to Ginger Costa-Jackson as Moll. But in fact, there are so many expert singers here that it’s impossible to credit them all. We owe Bridge Records a debt of gratitude for taking it on.

– Fanfare:

If you’ve always heard about the show and wondered what all the fuss was about, here is an excellent performance.

– American Record Guide

REVIEWS:
Billboard (11/27/99, p.54) - Recommended

Mark Kaplan is one of the leading violinists of his generation. Kaplan has been soloist with the New York and Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestras, the Cleveland and Philadelphia Orchestras, the Chicago and National Symphony Orchestras, and the symphony orchestras of St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Minnesota, Cincinnati and Indianapolis. He has collaborated with many of the world's foremost conductors, among them Ormandy, Tennstedt, Maazel, Ashkenazy, Dutoit, Bychkov, Conlon, Ivan Fischer, Foster, Gatti, Masur, Rattle, Robertson, Salonen, Semkov, Skrowaczewski, Slatkin, and Zinman. Since 2005, Mark Kaplan has been Professor of Violin at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music, and prior to that he served as Professor with Distinction at UCLA. He is a graduate of the Juilliard School, where he was a student of Dorothy DeLay and recipient of the Fritz Kreisler Memorial Scholarship.

Mark Kaplan plays a violin made by Antonio Stradivari in 1685, known as the Marquis. This recording is Kaplan's second studio traversal of the Sonatas and Partitas.

"Feasts of beautifully sculpted phrases...glimpses of heaven" - Philadelphia Inquirer

"Soulful depth...dramatic flair and contrast" - New York Times

For the fourth volume of music by Stephen Jaffe, the composer writes that he is "searching for sounds and musical relationships to create something new, like a poetry--where listeners may discover lyrical expression and an arc of narrative." These premiere recordings of three works written between 2006 and 2009, offer a program featuring Jaffe's collaborations with the Da Capo Chamber Players, the Borromeo String Quartet, and National Symphony Orchestra members David Hardy, cello and Lambert Orkis, piano. Composer Stephen Jaffe’s music has been featured at major concerts and festivals including the Nottingham, Tanglewood, and Oregon Bach Festivals, and performed throughout the U.S., Europe, and China by ensembles including the R.A.I. of Rome, Slovenska Filharmonija, the National Symphony, the San Francisco, North Carolina and New Jersey Symphonies, Berlin’s Spectrum Concerts, London’s Lontano, and many others. Jaffe’s recent works include new chamber concertos including Migrations (Chamber Concerto No. 4) for walking violinist and mobile chamber ensemble, and Three Arcs (Chamber Concerto 5) for chamber ensemble with cameo chorus, written for the 200th anniversary of the Musical Fund Society of Philadelphia. The collaborative cantata A Forest Unfolding, composed with Eric Moe, Melinda Wagner and David Kirkland Garner, and premiered at the Portland Chamber Music Festival and New Hampshire’s Electric Earth Concerts in 2018, was inspired by recent scientific work into the rich communication and subterranean connectivity between trees -- evoked also in Richard Power’s related novel The Overstory.

Among the most remarkable milestones of Perle’s compositional journey are a dozen works for solo instruments, “tone-centered” compositions – to adopt Richard Swift’s terminology – that occupy a middle ground between essays in orthodox twelve-tone practice and his own 12-tone modal system. It was easier, Perle recalled, “to approach this problem of harmony if you’re writing for an instrument which naturally plays only one note at a time.” Moreover, working with such radically reduced means honed his ability to use motive, contour, rhythm, and register to articulate form through a single line. The first of these was composed in 1942, with another eleven written across a distinguished career. This two-album set includes many of the solo works in their first recordings, as well as duo works from throughout the great American composer's career. Noted soloists on this release include pianists Leon Fleisher, Richard Goode, and Horacio Gutiérrez, clarinetist Charles Neidich, and cellist Jay Campbell.

The first three volumes of Anne-Marie McDermott's Mozart piano concerto cycle with Denmark's Odense Symfoniorkester have received ecstatic notices from the international musical press. Volume 4, again conducted by German maestro Sebastian Lang-Lessing, presents two of Mozart's very greatest concertos -  the grand C major, K. 503, and the brooding D minor, K. 466.

George Walker is one of the few leading American composers of the 20th century to produce as many as five piano sonatas. Taken together, they securely chart a lifetime of stylistic change. Walker managed many other feats, a number of them connected to being the first Black person to break through various glass ceilings: the first to be accepted at the Curtis Institute of Music, the first to study with Nadia Boulanger, and the first to win the Pulitzer Prize in Music. Walker is also one of the only major composer-pianists to have recorded worthy performances of virtuoso standard repertoire including Beethoven’s “Emperor Concerto” and the Brahms second piano concerto.

REVIEW:

"This beautifully played (and beautifully recorded) set of George Walker's piano sonatas by pianist Steven Beck is especially valuable. The sonatas trace Walker's development as a composer, from a sort of post-Copland style through an approach to serialism (he only rarely adopted it wholesale, but the mark of Webernian economy is all over the second and third sonatas here), back to a broader free atonality deepened by rigor."

Walker generally resisted the use of African American vernacular material in his essentially modernist style, but he might then introduce it when it is least expected, in entirely original ways. Anyone interested in this giant of African American classical music but not knowing where to start could easily choose this release."

--AllMusicGuide.com (James Manheim)

There is a strong tradition of American piano sonatas. Off the top of my head I can think of examples by Ives, Copland, Barber, Sessions and Carter and there are, no doubt, others. To these we can add the five sonatas of George Walker, an impressive contribution to the medium, which fit neatly onto one disc.

I had not heard of George Walker until a few months ago, when he was composer of the week in the BBC Radio 3 series. I was impressed by what I heard and so was glad of this opporunity to hear these sonatas. He had a long and successful career in the USA, despite the difficulties caused by his being African-American. He always intended a life in classical music, which I note as some African-American musicians, despite being classically trained, gravitate towards jazz. There are occasional jazz references and references to spirituals and folk songs in his works, but no more than one might expect in any other American composer, Copland for example.

Despite these sonatas being composed over a period of fifty years, they have more in common than what sets any of them apart. Walker has a fondness for sinewy counterpoint and somewhat angular harmonies, rather in the Hindemith way. He also likes strong single lines and chord sequences. His idiom is clearly twentieth century but is not particularly dissonant, and he likes a good deal of rhythmic vitality.

The first two sonatas, the closest together in time, have much in common. The fondness for counterpoint and for variation form is common to them. However, the first is consistently more playful, even jaunty, while the second conveys a sense of disaster being just round the corner. The second is also the more compact, despite being in four movements rather than three, and its Scherzo is only one minute and twelve seconds long.

The third sonata has two brief movements before a longer one and here we find a new riuchness of harmonic vocabulary, even suggesting Scriabin at one point. The second movement, titled Bell, is simply a succession of slow chords. The finale features constant changes of mood and texture.

The fourth sonata, in two movements only, is more angular than the earlier works. there are many ideas, among which leaping single lines, bell-like chorales and a fugal toccata are noteworthy.

The fifth sonata is in one movement only and is a formidable work, tightly wrought and intense. Perhaps it is the finest of the five.

Steven Beck is a contemporary music specialist and offers committed performances. The recording is excellent. Walker’s music is well worth getting to know.

--MusicWeb International (Stephen Barber)