For Bunita Marcus opens with a clear call to our attention. With these first six notes, we step over the threshold and into the journey of the piece. We know that we are in this for the long haul: Morton Feldman’s late works are notorious for being marathons. He composed For Bunita Marcus in 1985, immediately after his four-hour For Philip Guston, and two years after his six-hour String Quartet (II). These earlier works make an hour-long solo piano piece seem short. Still, it is a long time to sustain a single movement, a single journey, and we inevitably have this in mind as we take the first step: so this is how it starts.

Classical Music

WERGO presents Morton Feldman's more than four hours lasting trio "For Philip Guston" with the ensemble Breuer Engler Schrammel. Feldman disagreed with those who regarded his pieces since the 1970s as too long. "In music, it's very difficult to distinguish between a thing's proportions and it's form," he wrote. "My pieces aren't too long - they seem to fit the temporal landscape I provide. Would you say that 'The Odyssey' is too long?" Morton Feldman wrote the piece in memory of his best friend for more than 20 years, the American painter Philip Guston. The initial motif, C-G-A-flat-E-flat, refers to John Cage who had introduced Feldman to Guston in 1950.

Morton Feldman's Patterns in a Chromatic Field is a major composition, not only in modern American music but in 20th-century music per se. The composer plays with the musical memory of his recipients and thus creates timeless spheres: In minimally varying patterns, the listener experiences a trance-like avant-garde event in which past, present and future cancel each other out. Patterns in a Chromatic Field is based on the principle of differentiation and repetition. The composition functions like a still life, using the color variations of Middle Eastern rugs as a basis: Even a pattern that appears to repeat itself exactly is actually slightly different in its iterations because of slight changes in hue. In his piece for piano and violoncello, Morton Feldman now creates a large-scale auditive pattern whose sound aesthetics from the layers of notes is no less than a transformative and meditative experience of music. With Antonis Anissegos on the piano and Mathis Mayr, this recording unites two performers who not only are excellent instrumental players but also feel at home in electronic music – a fact that is of benefit to their version of Morton Feldman’s minimalist soaring tonal architecture. Anissegos and Mayr create a detailed and intimate sound quality which can be regarded as referential in its antithesis of the ‘dramatic’.

This release brings together ALL of Morton Feldman’s compositions for cello and piano, including unpublished works and a first recording.

Together, these works tell the story of Feldman’s music. They span 35 years — over half his lifetime — from when he was searching for his voice as a student to when he was opening new doors in the last years of his life.

The album is bookended by two realizations of the graphic score “Durations 2” (1960), giving an opportunity to hear what the flexibility of graphic notation can bring.

The “Sonatina” (1946) is the earliest work here, and a first recording. Displaying the influence of Béla Bartók, Feldman wrote for the cello sound he loved without fully understanding the realities of playing the instrument. The resulting solo part is naively virtuosic and often even impossible to play. For this recording, Stephen Marotto keeps as close as possible to the written score, aiming to fulfill what Feldman heard in his mind’s ear.

By 1948, Feldman had been studying privately with the composer Stefan Wolpe for several years. The unpublished “Two Pieces,” from that year is a fluctuating music held together not by logic, but through its carefully poised gestures — what Wolpe called “shape.” While the emotional drama of this and other early works would soon disappear from Feldman’s music, it was above all the idea of “shape” that remained with him for the rest of his life.

In 1950, Feldman met John Cage, who shepherded him into the world of the New York avant-garde. The unpublished, compact “Composition for cello and piano” (1951) is a sudden breakthrough, yet it already contains the DNA of his very last works in its minimal material and blurred memories of sounds.

“For Stockhausen, Cage, Stravinsky, and Mary Sprinson” (1972) is an ephemeral, unpublished piece, a shard of music broken off from the main body of work Feldman was producing at the time. It consists of just two musical moments separated by silence — the same chord expressed in two different ways.

At almost 1 hour and 29 minutes, “Patterns in a Chromatic Field” (1981) is one of Feldman’s late, long-duration works, and it is perhaps the best known of the works recorded here.

Liner notes by Samuel Clay Birmaher.

This set is offered at a special price: two discs for the price of one.

Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello was Morton Feldman’s last work. Not only does it have comparable qualities in scale and content to other mature masterpieces such as Piano and String Quartet (review), but also it seems, if anything, to possess them under an enhancing lens. The spread chords of Piano and String Quartet lend an elaborated, almost baroque flavour to the piece by comparison with the chords of Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello, which drop into the sonic landscape vertically.

There is much to be said about this music but there are few words which sum it up better than the composer’s own commentary on the stretched duration of his later pieces, “… scale is another matter. You have to have control of the piece – it requires a heightened kind of concentration. Before, my pieces were objects; now, they are like evolving things.”

Seventy-five minutes may seem daunting for a single piece of music, but it can easily embrace you in its time-altering atmosphere, and the duration can smoothly pass with the lightness of the beat of a butterfly’s wing. In the beauty of its closing minutes you can find yourself wishing it had been longer. That sense of ‘control’ is evident at every moment. There are no sections where the composer is marking time, nor thank goodness is there any evidence of the musicians back-pedalling in this excellent performance. There is relaxation and tension; as there is in the movement of your own chest when breathing. Notes and chords follow with impeccable logic from their predecessors, phrases are shaped, contrasts of timbre emerge, broad curves of profoundly far-reaching musical gesture are spread before us.

Everyone will have their own personal response to this, but for me it is an ultimate expression of loneliness. There is an undeniable melancholy about this piece, which always shifts away from any consolatory resolutions which seek to take root too firmly. There are fragments which might remind you of Debussy’s Des pas sur la neige, and in some ways it might be seen as a vast extension of its first two bars. As pianist Aleck Karis states in his brief booklet note, this is also a “luminous melancholy”, one which creates impulse and attracts rather than making one turn away and wish it would stop.

I’ve had a hunt around but there don’t seem to be any readily available alternatives. The Hat Hut label released a recording in 1995 with members of the Dutch Ives Ensemble which is no longer in print. In any case I have no hesitation in choosing this as a default first choice. If I have any criticism of the recording it is that the piano sounds a little soft-textured or mid-range heavy in its timbre, but this is not something which detracts from the effect of the whole.

-- Dominy Clements, MusicWeb International

“I paint the white as well as the black, and the white is just as important.” What the American painter Franz Kline said about his paintings, can be applied equally to Morton Feldman’s compositions. For Morton Feldman, composition means defining sound space, and this is done just as much with the "black" of the notes as with the "white" silence, the absence of sound. In its reduction of sound elements, its new balance of sound and not-sound, Feldman’s music attains the magical, floating quality that the composer admired in the early – non-figurative – paintings of his friend Philip Guston: “the complete absence of gravity” of a painting that is “not confined to a painting space but rather existing somewhere in the space between the canvas and ourselves,” as Feldman once wrote. Again and again, Feldman noted that the illusion of stasis in his scores could only be understood in the context of his intensive engagement with the visual arts.

Morton Feldman was one of the most enigmatic composers of the 20th century. That is to say, he was extremely intelligent and enormously opinionated, pulled no punches when it came to passing judgement on historical figures or his peers, and loved to talk about his work, so that there is a remarkable collection of his writings and many scattered interviews to give us insight into his music. And yet the information he offered, frequently anecdotal, was often philosophic or metaphoric in nature, so that it ultimately revealed few specifics about his compositional methods and aesthetic choices. For example, as forthcoming as he was about his obsessive relationship with painting, primarily although not exclusively the work of the Abstract Expressionist painters of the late 1940's, 50's and 60's who were his close friends, we find that for all his talk, of the congruities between artistic and musical qualities of scale, surface, or space, among others, much of his music - especially the later, longer scores of which Patterns In A Chromatic Field is a prime example - remains mysteriously idiosyncratic and marvelously cryptic.

FELDMAN Patterns in a Chromatic Field. 1 Projection I. Composition—8 Little Pieces. 1 Intersection IV. Duration II 1 • Arne Deforce (vc); Yutaka Oya (pn) 1 • AEON 977 (2 CDs: 105:31)


Morton Feldman’s Patterns in a Chromatic Field (also known as Untitled Composition for Cello and Piano ) dates from the early 1980s, a period when the composer was beginning his ultimate obsession with the construction of large-scale works (in this performance, 88 minutes) from the repetition and juxtaposition of small, often unrelated events. These might be brief episodes of whispery cello phrases and chiming piano chords, stuttering motifs, or sustained notes that rub against one another with a soothing friction. In such a stark, seemingly static context, these events may suggest visual shapes woven into a gradually changing musical fabric—hence the “patterns” of the title. With its dry, undemonstrative demeanor, the music is not flattering to instrumentalists; nevertheless, cellist Deforce and pianst Oya are able to sustain tension throughout extended periods of low dynamics and subtle detail, growing ever so slightly but increasingly dramatic as the unannounced, unanticipated end approaches.


Appended to this major work are four of Feldman’s earliest scores, each of which gives the player(s) various degrees of freedom and responsibility in the realization of the music. Projection I (1950) and Intersection IV (1951), both for solo cello, are graphic scores in which the number of notes in a phrase, relative range of pitch, and approximate duration are provided to offer the performers what Feldman called “windows of opportunities” to project sounds into space. Duration II (1960) supplies the cellist and pianist with notes on conventional staves, but without stems or bar lines to determine timing and phrasing. Finally, Composition—8 Little Pieces (1950) is an oddity, an unpublished and previously unrecorded score which might be the Composition for two pianos and cello of that year listed in Feldman’s catalog of works. There is no description or explanation of the work in the booklet’s program notes, which are excerpted from Feldman’s own writings. In any case, though the Webernesque concision of these works makes Patterns in a Chromatic Field seem Mahlerian by comparison, the relationship between the instruments, the nature of the harmonic language, and the attention to detail make all of this music, early or late, regardless of method of composition, undeniably and distinctively Feldman’s own.


FANFARE: Art Lange

American composer Morton Feldman is best known for being a founding member of the New York School, a group of musicians and artists that pursued an experimental style of composition in the 1950s and 60s. His works for cello and piano are included in full in this special collection. Among the composer's earlier works is the Two Pieces (1948), characterised by its emphatic chromaticism, in keeping with the avant-garde style of the era. After having met John Cage in 1950, and forming the New York School, there was a change in Feldman's compositional style. Among the works from this era are several indeterminate works, such as Projection 1 and Intersection 4. The final stage in Feldman's compositional career dates from the post-1970s, when Feldman had moved from New York to take up a professorship at the University of Buffalo. Compositions from this time include Patterns in a chromatic field, a work full of chains of melodic cells repeated with subtle variations in pitch or melody, which relies on the impulses of the performer.

The works are performed here by the Italian musicians Marco Simonacci (cello), Giancarlo Simonacci (piano), Fabio Frapparelli (horn), and Paola Ronchetti and Ilaria Severo (sopranos), Each has an international reputation as a performer and recording artist.

Other information:
- Recorded in 2012.
- Morton Feldman is without doubt one of the most remarkable and influential composers of the second half of 20th century America. His experimental works (where the course of a composition is often open to multiple interpretations) are based on melodic cells which are endlessly and subtly varied and developed in immensely long and slow moving structures (sometimes of several hours), producing a hallucinatory effect on the audience. Especially over the last few years Feldman became an iconic cult figure, an antidote against modern time's stress.
- Excellent performances by father and son Simonacci, who proved their innate feeling for the idiom in their many recordings of the works of John Cage on Brilliant Classics.
- Contains liner notes on the composer and works.
- Contains performer biographies.

Steffen Schleiermacher has often fascinated his public with works by Morton Feldman. Along with Christian Giger, the solo cellist in the famous Gewandhaus Orchestra, he is now presenting Patterns in a Chromatic Field - an extensive composition showing us the minimalist master's more entertaining side. Here, highly virtuosic passages alternate with petrified soundscapes; now the instruments seem to melt, now their contrasting nature becomes the point of reference. While avoiding any sort of developmental idea, a tonal process of great suggestive power is produced over the course of some eighty minutes. -- MD&G

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REVIEW:

This is very satisfying and musically highly refined. There is a balance to be struck between enigmatic modernity and romantic affection for an abstract tradition which is in line with both Mark Rothko’s New York and Beethoven’s Vienna, and this is beautifully struck by these musicians. If you are a Feldman fan then this will be a very satisfying addition to your collection. Feldman newbies might find an 80 minute duo for cello and piano on a single CD track more than a little daunting, but, as with his other extended works, if you allow the piece its own space and inhabit it as you would an art gallery, then you will gradually sense your cells and synapses aligning themselves to something rather special.

– MusicWeb International

Volume 3 in Steffen Schleiermacher’s survey of Morton Feldman’s late and heavenly long piano works couples Piano (1977) and Palais de Mari (1987) for at least the third time on CD. Schleiermacher’s concentrated precision and masterful control of the composer’s minutely differentiated dynamics easily supersedes Ronnie Lynn Paterson’s less-polished pianism and overly slow tempos while matching Aki Takahashi’s surface sheen and wealth of nuance.

To be certain, Takahashi benefits from closer, more immediate engineering, and Mode fills out her disc with earlier (and much shorter!) Feldman fare. Yet Feldmanites who like MDG’s relatively distant ambience will appreciate how powerfully Piano’s sudden, loud chordal outbursts and residual overtones register. And in Palais de Mari, Schleiermacher’s vocally informed phrasing and long-lined fluidity contrasts to Sabine Leibner’s more austere deliberation (both interpretations hold equal validity, yet are quite different, and I wouldn’t want to give up either one). A worthy follow-up to Schleiermacher’s previous Feldman releases.

-- Jed Distler, ClassicsToday.com

Morton Feldman stated, "The degrees of stasis, found in a Rothko or Guston, were perhaps the most significant elements I brought to my music from painting. For me, stasis, scale, and pattern have put the whole question of symmetry and asymmetry in abeyance."... Typically, as is the case in "For John Cage", Feldman presents a pattern (or sequence) of notes and/or chords, and may repeat them an unpredictable and asymmetrical number of times, until they are succeeded by the next pattern, but the pattern is never developed, reorganized, or manipulated in any conventional fashion. Thus successive patterns are linked (or woven) together in an ongoing fabric of music, and an individual pattern may appear to be static, unchanging or unmoving. This is an illusion, however, since movement may be alternately measured by speed, emphasis (or attack), and (instrumental) color.

For Christian Wolff is one of Morton Feldman's final compositions, and stands alongside the four-hours-plus For Philip Guston, the 70-minute For John Cage, and the six-hour String Quartet II. Writing about hearing this work, Christian Wolff says that "I found the experience of listening to it beautiful and interesting - it moves away partly from our (Morty's, John Cage's and mine) original preoccupation with just sound and sonority into areas of self-awareness about listening, being a listener, as such, because there's so much time to be thinking of this and that as well as just listening." The California EAR Unit's performances of Feldman's For Philip Guston (BRIDGE 9078A/D) and Crippled Symmetry (BRIDGE 9092A/B) have received high praise from the international musical press.