reviews
Rangzen Quartet/Christina Fong - For Feldman
OgreOgress
This is an audio DVD containing some 95 minutes of music interweaving early Feldman string quartet work (otherwise unavailable on disc, I believe, at the time of this recording in 2004) with contemporary pieces by four composers in debt to him to one degree or another. The bulk of the compositions (six out of seven) are performed by the Rangzen Quartet (Karen Krummel/cello, Heather Storeng/viola, Christopher Martin/violin and Sieu Mahn Phong/violin). The last selection, a half-hour long piece by David Beardsley is a quartet performance with all parts overdubbed by Christina Fong.
“mf” (triple entendre’d for Feldman, mezzo-forte and, well, mf) by David Toub is a motoric piece that will immediately call early Glass to mind, specifically the violin parts written for Paul Zukofsky in “Einstein on the Beach”. But over the course of its 13 ½ minutes, it gently splays out into adjacent chromatic areas, providing a bit more grist than the sweetness offered early on. I can’t say I hear much of particular relevance to Feldman, apart from perhaps those chromatic asides which do relate a bit to aspects of the succeeding pieces, but it’s an enjoyable enough appetizer.
The master’s “Two Pieces for String Quartet” (1954) are sequenced next. Spare, unsurprisingly, but having a kind of implied processional cadence that gives them a rather stately air. The quartet provides a nice amount of rasp and grit, serving to keep the works sensuously earthbound rather than ethereal. As with much early Feldman, it’s fascinating to parse out which elements would be retained in his later work and how they’d be adapted. David Kotlowy, in his “of Shade to Light”, pays homage to both Feldman and Schoenberg by using the pitch series from the latter’s “Klavierstuck, Op. 33b” but organizing into “cells” of the sort found in the former’s mature compositions with similar calm, barely irregular pacing and delicate sense of note placement. It’s an effective juxtaposition and beautifully handled, the strings often acquiring a wooden flute-like quality (shakuhachi even) only to be suddenly subsumed into a full, lush bed of chords before emerging, once again austere, to shake themselves dry. I also pick up a little bit of Bryars, happily sans the saccharine; an excellent piece. It’s bracketed by Feldman’s “For String Quartet” (1956), an even sparser composition than the pair from two years before, making substantial use of silences between small groupings of notes near the beginning though again developing its own off-kilter tempo, a gentle lurching that imparts a wonderful tentativeness, almost naïveté, to the piece.
“New England, Late Summer”, by John Prokop, was written to serve as background music for the composer’s wedding, an event that also utilized compositions by Feldman, Bach and the Beatles (“Hey, Jude”). Intending to go almost unnoticed, it has a languid, slowly eddying sense of movement, wherein elements, including pitch arrangements, that initially appear laid out in fairly rigorous minimalist fashion begin to mutate and form various “alliances”, shifting into new, though not dissimilar configurations. Eno’s “Music for Airports” might be cited as a general reference point. It’s drawn out a bit more than it might have been but then again, it strives to be ignorable so perhaps, in its original context anyway, that was not a concern. The final work from Feldman is his “Three Pieces for String Quartet” which is simply a regrouping of the prior two pieces and, as near as I can tell, use the exact same recordings as before (the timings are identical). Odd, if true, though for the purpose of reflecting the more contemporary pieces, it’s an interesting maneuver.
I remember running into David Beardsley on various music lists back in the day, so it was a pleasant surprise to come across him here. His composition, “as beautiful as a crescent of a new moon on a cloudless spring evening” (the title derived from a comment of Feldman’s after observing an effect of light passing through a glass of water), for string quartet (overdubbed for this recording) turns out to be, along with the Kotlowy, my favorite new work on the disc, a lengthy drone-oriented performance in just intonation that, at an ear-glance, could often be mistaken for bagpipes. There’s a similar use of a low, underlying tone, over which are plied two (at least) microtonal lamina in long, pulsating lines, generally given urgent stress by Fong at each note’s conclusion. There may be more Tony Conrad at play than Morton Feldman but I’m not complaining. It’s a tough, intense work that caps a strong, unusual selection of new and (slightly) old music for strings.
“For Feldman” is yet another fine recording from the impressive OgreOgress label, one of the richest releases from the non-improv side of the aisle I’ve heard this year.
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actually, mf was an arrangement of an earlier work for brass and, as such, was not written with Feldman in mind. But it’s appropriate for this collection just the same. If you would like to hear a work that was originally intended as an homage to Feldman, feel free to listen to five notes for christina fong.
I love Feldman’s Three Pieces for String Qt. This is the third recording I’ve got, and a quite good one (much better than the Mondriaan, I think). I also agree that the Kotlowy is very nice.
Walter, I’ve never heard the original LP recording of Three Pieces by the Juilliard Quartet or the Mondrian CD, which is out of print. How do these 3 recordings differ from each other?
I’m probably biased because I was moved so much by that Odyssey LP while in high school and college, but I think it’s a lovely performance from any perspective. The slightly distant (and in the case of my record, a bit scratchy) reproduction only seems to me to add to its ethereal qualities. The pick-up group on that record were, of course, all top notch musicians and interpreters of contemporary music. I haven’t compared the tempi, but I think they’re pretty similar–maybe the Odyssey is a hair slower in a couple of spots.
I should say that I very much like the performance on your disc as well. Maybe, though, its “smoothness” makes it sound a bit more 21st century than 1960s (if that makes any sense).
At any rate, I’m really glad that you’ve put it out! There can’t be too many recordings of that wonderful little piece.
Hear hear. And, before you ask Glenn, it’s going to be reviewed over at my place too!
Prokop is an amazing guy. He goes by “Sparky”. He lives in my neighborhood and is a total scholar of Feldman and baseball.
I met him at my Laundrymat years ago. he ran home and came back with a great solo bass piece he had written every time I see him we have a great conversation about new music. It is good to see his music getting out there.
Yes Walter, you are correct. There was an entirely different way to approach performing Feldman’s music in the 1950s. Even though we grow up listening to a certain performance, quite often there are major errors in those performances, especially those recorded prior to 1960. I really think many (not all) performers during that time simply had no idea what Feldman had in mind (with some exceptions). This does not make older performances better or worse, but accuracy to the score in terms of rhythm, balance and dynamics (especially for “new music” performances) seemed optional in many cases … the spirit of the music was regarded as more important, which is subjective in my opinion.