Boring Like A Drill.

Thirteen years ago I heard the GBSR Duo of George Barton and Siwan Rhys performing Morton Feldman’s For Philip Guston in the chilly back room of an art gallery for four-and-a-half hours. On that occasion, the flute part was played by a tag-team of two, working in shifts.I remember the earlier performance being slightly rough around the edges, in a clear and sympathetic interpretation – particularly Barton and Rhys. The flute part is especially tricky, for the listener as it is for the flautist: as Feldman understood, it is a loud instrument. How should it blend with piano and celesta, vibraphone and chimes? It can tend to dominate (e.g. the rather forthright recording made by the California EAR Unit). This afternoon, at Kings Place, Rhys on keyboards and Barton on percussion accompanied Taylor MacLennan on the flutes for a new interpretation of the piece, to launch their recording of all three of Feldman’s large trios. In this version, their understanding of how the three musicians relate was clear, with the flute primus inter pares in what aspires to be a soliloquy of the simplest and most elemental gestures, complicated by piano and percussion mirroring and echoing the parts in a fraught balance.

The immediate impression when they started playing was that they understood the dynamics, with MacLennan’s flute as gentle as possible (allowing for the impossibility of a quiet piccolo). I shouldn’t have to tell you that GBSR have better chops now than when they were kids. Barton plays mallet instruments with supreme softness, just enough to be heard through the hall. Rhys made her two keyboards blend seamlessly with Barton’s playing and with each other, creating a mercurial compound instrument. MacLennan seemed indefatigable, giving the audience full licence to find a wide range of interpretations alluded to in the programme notes without ever needing to emote. The spare, unadorned material and thin textures made substance from outlines. While I expected some degree of raggedness to inevitably creep in over time, the trio maintained a dignified stillness throughout, with a suprising consistency in sound where any tiredness was sensed and expected rather than aurally present. Better still, they maintained a flow throughout the piece’s excessive length, minimising the tendency in Feldman’s writing to create a series of episodes that inevitably wind down before starting over.

I mentioned before that I hear this piece differently every time. In the subterranean recital room of Kings Place, with such disciplined musicians, there were no external cue to the passing of time. The piece seemed longer than I remembered, particularly as it started to double back upon itself. This, with the way the trio played, left me at times entirely disorientated. I started finding certain passages too long, or too inert, then suddenly becoming alert and enthralled again, for no evident reason – this composition is a cussed beast. Like too many things in life, I wanted it to be over while knowing I’d be sad when it was done. (Why does he bring in the piccolo so early in the piece?) It all comes together in the long ending and coda, possibly the most audacious and subtle of Feldman’s compositional tricks. I need to hear MacLennan, Barton and Rhys’s recording of it soon, along with their versions of Why Patterns? and Crippled Symmetry.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Morton Feldman