Out of stock
CD
Morton FELDMAN
“For Bunita Marcus”
Aki Takahashi, piano.
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.
For Bunita Marcus, like all the late Feldman works, is an adventure that takes a relatively long time to play out, but which is remarkably lacking in heaviness. We may expect an epic, but we get something much subtler. Indeed, what we get is the present moment, in all its beauty, over and over again. If we surrender to the musical image that is right in front of us, a piece like For Bunita Marcus is an easy world to enter into and to explore with Feldman. We step into the silence after that first six-note motto, and we wonder: What comes next? The next hour and a quarter is spent doing nothing more than discovering what comes next—and the next thing after that, and the next after that.
For Bunita Marcus is performed here by Aki Takahashi, one of the greatest Feldman intrepreters. After Triadic Memories, Feldman composed all his piano music for Aki Takahashi. In remarks made before the U.S. premiere of Triadic Memories, he described Takahashi as “absolutely still,” “undisturbed, unperturbed, as if in a concentrated prayer.” He found that her concentration was transmitted to the audience; a performance by her was “like a séance.” Ms. Takahashi premiered the work in Middleburg, The Netherlands in 1985. Through her performance, the journey of For Bunita Marcus is rich in color, pacing and poetry.
The cover photo of Feldman, Bunita Marcus and Aki Takahashi was taken around the time of the premiere.
16,50€
Out of stock
5 CD box
Morton FELDMAN
“Piano”
5-CD box set presenting virtually all of Morton Feldman'smusic for solo piano. Performed by Philip Thomas, who also writes a 52-page booklet that is included in the box.
Artwork by David Ainley
Philip Thomas, piano
40,00€
Out of stock
CD
Morton FELDMAN
“Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello”
Feldman’s last work, played by Mark Knoop, piano, Aisha Orazbayeva, violin, Bridget Carey, viola, Anton Lukoszevieze, cello.
“I’ve been slowly working through the late Feldman works over the past 10 years or so, including several performances of For John Cage with Aisha Orazbayeva, and she suggested we do Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello at a Café Oto gig in September last year. The concert turned out to be on one of the hottest days of the year and was an exhaustingly wonderful experience of combined concentration from both audience and performers in a sweltering Café Oto. Shortly afterwards, Simon Reynell mentioned that he would like to record the piece, which we did on one of the coldest days in early January!” Jack Sheen interviews Mark Knoop.
“I’ve been slowly working through the late Feldman works over the past 10 years or so, including several performances of For John Cage with Aisha Orazbayeva, and she suggested we do Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello at a Café Oto gig in September last year. The concert turned out to be on one of the hottest days of the year and was an exhaustingly wonderful experience of combined concentration from both audience and performers in a sweltering Café Oto. Shortly afterwards, Simon Reynell mentioned that he would like to record the piece, which we did on one of the coldest days in early January!” Jack Sheen interviews Mark Knoop.
13,00€
Out of stock
2 CD
Morton FELDMAN
“Crippled Symmetry, live at June in Buffalo”
“2 CD set in slim card package. In 2000, Eberhard Blum (flute, alto flute, bass flute), Nils Vigeland (glockenspiel, vibraphone) and Jan Williams (piano, celesta), Morton Feldman’s close friends and collaborators, came together once more as “The Feldman Soloists” to perform Crippled Symmetry, the trio Feldman composed for them, on the 25th anniversary celebration of June in Buffalo, the festival he founded. The recording of this concert is now finally available on CD, and is destined to become the reference recording of this work. Required listening for all fans of Feldman’s rich, hypnotic world of enigmatic harmony and mnemonic echo. Mastered by Denis Blackham, and presented in a card package which unfolds to reveal the musicians’ "butterfly-like" arrangement on stage.
"This turned out to be one of the best performances that we had ever given together. The rare and indescribable ‘magic moment’ of occasion and ambience seems to have inspired us. The recording of the concert belongs to my most valued sound documents. When I listened to it for the first time, my immediate reaction was: this performance ought to be available on CD. Now, ten years later, it is.” Eberhard Blum
17,00€
Out of stock
2 CD
Morton FELDMAN
“Two pianos and other pieces, 1953-1969”
A 2 CD of music for multiple pianos from what is arguably the most experimental and interesting period of Morton Feldman’s development as a composer. Some of the pieces have been very rarely performed or recorded, and have probably never been in better hands.
John Tilbury, Philip Thomas, Catherine Laws & Mark Knoop, pianos. Anton Lukoszevieze & Seth Woods, cellos. Mira Benjamin & Linda Jankowska, violins. Rodrigo Constanzo & Taneli Clarke, percussion. Barrie Webb, trombone. Naomi Atherton, horn.
“Two Pianos (1957). “Four Instruments” (1965). “Vertical Thoughts 1” (1963), “Between Categories” (1969), “Piece for Four Pianos” (1957). “Piano Four Hands” (1958). “Intermission 6” (1953), “De Kooning” (1963), “Two Pieces for Three Pianos” (1966), “Piano Three Hands” (1957), “False Relationships and the Extended Ending” (1968), “Two Pianos second version” (1957).
Notes on Morton Feldman’s “Two Pianos and other pieces” by Philip Thomas. The music featured on these two discs testifies to the intensity of Feldman’s experimentation with notation and sound during the 1950s and 60s. Considering the works chronologically one senses the composer trying out, teasing and developing means of notation to get close to his desired elasticity of time and duration. His experiments with indeterminacy of pitch - whereby Feldman specified only the register (high, middle, low) of sound rather than the exact notes themselves - do not feature here; after trying this method in a series of works in the early 1950s he abandoned the technique, with a few notable exceptions straying into the 1960s, because he was too ‘attached’ to the pitches he wanted.
All notes are specified exactly in the pieces on these discs - the experiments are instead with duration and time. Durations of sounds are variously free, dependent upon the decay of the sound, worked out in coordination with other players, as well as at times exactly and complexly notated within a specific tempo. Sometimes the freedoms of notating time are worked through in combination with listening closely to the sounds of other players, allowing patterns to emerge without forcing the situation, whilst at other times different ways of notating time are combined, creating false alignments in the score and thus placing greater emphasis upon the individual performer’s journey.
The piano is an inherently indeterminate instrument - any given note will have a very different afterlife dependent upon the touch of the performer, the register of the note, the type and size of the piano, the acoustic of the space in which the piano is situated, and so forth. Put six or seven of these notes together as a chord and the situation becomes complex. In all these pieces Feldman specifies the dynamics to be quiet, or as quiet as possible, or very quiet. However the notion that Feldman’s music is ‘about’ quiet-ness is a misconception: the subject is sound, and in order for that subject to be properly attended to those sounds are quiet. The range of pieces presented here depict very many different types of quietness - from the delicate sounds of Piano Three Hands and Piano Four Hands to the massed complexities of Two Pieces for Three Pianos. Quietness in Feldman’s piano music is a performance instruction which is everything to do with touch and the desire to really hear the instrument. As such these recordings are a celebration of the piano (its tone and its decay) and piano playing, for all its frustrations and challenges - an instrument which is at the heart of Feldman’s music.
23,00€
Out of stock
2 CD
Morton FELDMAN
“Trio”
“Trio” (1980). “Aki Takahashi (piano), Rohan de Saram (cello), Marc Sabat, violin. The expansive length of Feldman’s Trio (105 min. 22 sec) requires a new approach to listening, which takes scale, the physical experience of sound, and novel uses of musical memory into consideration. With his delicate manipulation of musical materials, Feldman blurs the listeners’ sense of time as their musical memory struggles to distinguish between past and present sounds - listeners are free to lose themselves in the beauty of each musical moment. Aki Takahashi and Rohan de Saram (formerly of the Arditti Quartet) both worked closely with Feldman. Marc Sabat is among today’s great Feldman interpreters, having recorded Feldman’s complete music for violin & piano on Mode. Available also as a single DVD with full video and extras. This is the only readily available performance of the Trio available in the U.S.A. Original recording in superb 96khz, 24-bit sonics. For the stereo mix, the violin and piano are clearly separated left and right to accentuate their interplay. 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. These subtle nuances are brought out by the detail of the recording.”
22,00€