Feldman: Piano and String Quartet

The first time through I found myself gritting my teeth wanting more to happen. And it never did. And I was impatient and frustrated. The second time through I simply let it play in the background as I did something else. The third time through, having determined that it was not 'awful' and probably really quite good if I'd let it be, I decided to really listen through its entire length and see what I could hear. That's when I came to understand that Feldman's music repays close listening. There are very subtle happenings--phase changes, harmonic changes, minuscule 'events,'--and I came to really admire the concentration of the musicians involved--in this recording pianist Aki Takahashi and the Kronos Quartet. And then I recalled reading somewhere that the Kronos Quartet has given up playing the Second Quartet--that five hour span--because, as I remember it, they said they'd gotten 'too old.' I can understand that. This is, for all its minimal dynamics and slow tempo, enormously difficult music to play because of the intense concentration involved.

What of the music itself? I felt my pulse and breathing slowing down, my tension easing away and yet an inability to pull myself away from concentrating on it. In some ways it must be like meditation, except I found my mind active, not lulled. It became a puzzle whose solution I needed to find, even as I felt calmed by it.

What I'm trying to say is that this is not like any music I've ever listened to before, and it took new 'ears' and 'mind' to take it in, but once I did I was repaid. The general layout is delicate arpeggios or single notes in the piano against slowing evolving mostly diatonic chords in the strings, never rising above a modest mezzo piano. Simple enough. But strangely evolving. And it goes by slowly enough that one has time to really think deeply about what is happening.

I think there are two valid ways to hear this music. One is to let it pass over you, or through you, without your giving it much attention. But the more rewarding way is to HEAR what is happening.

Thank you, weirdears and Edward Wright. And thank you, Aki Takahashi and Kronos.

Scott Morrison

Feldman is a minimalist in the most natural sense...like Mondrian or Rothko in painting, or Robert Creely in poetry, or Becket in Theater. Feldman's minimalism is based on limiting the means of composition and leaving space on his sonic canvas. (as opposed to Reich, Riley and Glass who limit musical means but then cover the page with their patterns. It's what a friend of mine calls energy minimalism.) In the case of Piano and String Quartet, the basic musical means are easily described. The quartet play delicately balanced chords, while the piano plays ethereal fillagrees...arpeggios and crystalline chords, all at very low volume levels (the piece never gets louder than piano). Each iteration of this material arises from silence and recedes back into the silence. It sounds profoundly natural, like waves of sound. The musical language is lush and haunting...neither tonal or atonal, but something that floats in between. (Another big difference between Feldman and the minimalist school is that Feldman's harmonic sense is more complex...and may have actually had some influence on later developments in minimalism, particularly on Reich's more chromatic music of the 80's onwards.)

The real art of this piece is in the details. Though the basic compositional form stays rather static throughout the piece, there is never a literal repeat. Each new statement of the material changes in small but, in the context, monumental ways. The chords change slowly and subtley, the piano goes from aprpeggios to solid chords. The string halo of harmony changes in weight and register, the rhythms (meticulously written out by Feldman...there is no rubato here...Feldman wrote it all in)make subtle changes both in durations of notes and of the rests and silences. Anything that breaks the pattern is significant. In this context, when the cello enters with a pizzacato passage about half way into the piece, the effect is shattering.

I can't exactly describe the effect of this on me...it's meditative but not like Part...it's more like something that makes me intensely aware of the beauty of the individual moment (the ecstasy of the moment in Morty's words) The effect is curiously autumnal, like late Brahms. You feel it almost as an ache in the heart at the beauty and frailty of the passing world. (Sorry this is so nebulous, but late Feldman seems to inspire such poetic musings, I find.)

The performance on this disc is about as perfect as you can find. Feldman's music is notoriously difficult to perform. (I've tried to play some of the early piano pieces myself and they are fiendish, even though they don't sound it.) The difficulties are not really technical...this isn't Liszt or Paganini. But the sustained concentration for the performer is unbelievable. No measure is exactly the same in rhythm, and you have to count like mad. The results on this Cd however are sublime. You are not aware of the effort of the performers, just the waves of sound floating in and out of consciouness. And Takahashi is sublime. There isn't a bad note in the performance. (Incidentally, I belong to a listserve on Feldman and, though members can rarely agree on anything else, this album always gets the highest rate of reccomendation.)

Like others here, I'd hesitate to recommend this to newcomers to Feldman's work. Better to listen to Rothko Chapel or the Tilson Thomas Coptic Light recording. In both cases the works on the discs are only at most a half an hour long...Piano and String Quartet clocks in at almost 80 minutes. But once you get hooked on Feldman you'll want to explore this work, which I think is one of Feldman's most ravishing and strongest. (And once you graduate from this one, you may want to tackle the new Hat Art recording of String Quartet No. 2 which is breathtaking and runs over 4 hours!)

As far as the composition, I personally found this to be as strong a work as he wrote in his later years. And as for the performance: Kronos has never sounded better. This work requires stamina, focus, and coloration as opposed to dexterous virtuosity (of which they were certainly capable); Kronos does the job magnificently. Kudos to the recording engineers as well, who manage to emphasize the "sound." Aki Takahashi was one of three pianists of choice for Feldman during his lifetime, and I can hear why.

The performance is maximum length for one CD (79 & 1/2 minutes) so I suspect all parties involved wanted to see that the work was SLOW enough, but fit the format's constraints.

If I was to recommend an introductory recording to Feldman's music, I'd probably choose "Rothko Chapel" first. But if you really want to dive in...try this one.