A Very Feldman Christmas

Thursday 21 December 2006

Having just blabbed on about Morton Feldman below, YouTube has some video of the concert I attended: Debora Petrina performing Three Dances (1951). This is not typical Feldman! An early, unusually sparse work, even by his standards: it was composed with choreography in mind, and Petrina has managed to combine her own choreography with the musical performance. Not the best video quality, and not Feldman at his best, but this is rare stuff.
If you don’t know anything about Feldman’s music and want to throw yourself in at the deep end, Radio Tonkuhle in Germany is playing his String Quartet II on Christmas Day, as performed by the Ives Ensemble. The live stream starts at 23:00 (GMT+1) on 25 December.
If, for some reasons, you have other plans that day and miss the broadcast, Princeton’s WPRB is playing the same piece, performed by the Flux Quartet, on 29 December ( live stream at 11:00 GMT-5).
String Quartet II (1983) is Feldman’s most notorious work: a single movement for quartet, quiet and slow throughout, and long enough to go beyond the standard considerations of structure and form, into an immersion into a sustained, unique soundworld without a past, a future, or a sense of scale. The Flux Quartet play the full six-hour version, while the Ives Ensemble take the “easy” route with the trimmed-down, four-hour version. Have fun justifying this to any relatives you have staying over for the holidays.
This will probably be the last post until new year. Have a good one!