Complete Music for Cello & Piano
MORTON FELDMAN (1926–1987)
Complete Music for Cello & Piano
Stephen Marotto, cello
Marilyn Nonken, piano
CD 1
1. Durations 2 (1960) [Realization 1] 4:09
2–9. Composition for cello & piano (1951)
I 0:29 / II 0:30 / III 0:21 / IV 0:25 / V 0:28 / VI 0:27 / VII 0:23 / VIII 1:24
Sonatina (1946) FIRST RECORDING
10. I Allegro 3:33
11. II Larghetto cantabile e tranquillo 3:51
12. III Allegro grazioso 2:07
Two Pieces (1948)
13. I Allegro 0:28
14. II Intermezzo 1:09
15. For Stockhausen, Cage, Stravinsky, and Mary Sprinson (1972) 0:45
Patterns in a Chromatic Field (1981)
(Arbitrary index points were selected for ease of navigation)
16. mm 1–387, page 1 14:19
17. mm 388–558, page 20 9:57
CD 2
Patterns in a Chromatic Field (continued)
1. mm 559–792, page 27 14:16
2. mm 793–864, page 35 13:21
3. mm 865–1045, page 46 8:14
4. mm 1046–1166, page 52 13:07
5. mm 1167–1426, page 64 7:49
6. mm 1427–end, page 69 7:38
7. Durations 2 (1960) [Realization 2] 3:52
This release brings together ALL of Morton Feldman’s compositions for cello and piano, including unpublished works and a first recording.
Together, these works tell the story of Feldman’s music. They span 35 years — over half his lifetime — from when he was searching for his voice as a student to when he was opening new doors in the last years of his life.
The album is bookended by two realizations the graphic score “Durations 2” (1960), giving an opportunity to hear what the flexibility of graphic notation can bring.
The “Sonatina” (1946) is earliest work here, and a first recording. Displaying the influence of Béla Bartók, Feldman wrote for the cello sound he loved without fully understanding the realities of playing the instrument. The resulting solo part is naively virtuosic and often even impossible to play. For this recording, Stephen Marotto keeps as close as possible to the written score, aiming to fulfill what Feldman heard in his mind’s ear.
By 1948, Feldman had been studying privately with the composer Stefan Wolpe for several years. The unpublished “Two Pieces,” of that year is a fluctuating music held together not by logic, but through its carefully poised gestures — what Wolpe called “shape.” While the emotional drama of this and other early works would soon disappear from Feldman’s music, it was above all the idea of “shape” that remained with him for the rest of his life.
In 1950, Feldman met John Cage, who shepherded him into the world of the New York avant-garde. The unpublished, compact, “Composition for cello and piano” (1951) is a sudden breakthrough, yet it already contains the DNA of his very last works in its minimal material and blurred memories of sounds.
“For Stockhausen, Cage, Stravinsky, and Mary Sprinson” (1972) is an ephemeral, unpublished piece, a shard of music broken off from the main body of work Feldman was producing at the time. It consists of just two musical moments separated by silence — the same chord expressed in two different ways.
At almost 1 hour 29 minutes, “Patterns in a Chromatic Field” (1981) is of Feldman’s late, long duration period of works and it perhaps the best known of the works recorded here.
Liner notes by Samuel Clay Birmaher.
Reviews
The title of Patterns in a Chromatic Field invites a visual analogy to the American school of abstract expressionism that sprang up in New York after the war. If we could train or at least encourage our ears to listen to Feldman the way we look at Rothko or de Kooning, we might come closer to the essence of the music. Cello and piano circle around each other, forming patterns and then decomposing them. They share a melody, and pause for thought over an element of it. This in turn leads them further away from, or back towards, the distinctive slithering motif that begins the piece.
Just because this form of expression takes place in time, it need not lead anywhere: this was John Cage’s discovery, and before him Erik Satie’s. Feldman learned from his friend Cage, and from the music of Webern, to build an interior world that rejects the need for continuity, or even pulse. Once we cease waiting for something to happen, Patterns becomes among the most eventful (action-packed would be pushing it) of Feldman’s long late pieces.
Compared to Rohan de Saram and Marianne Schroeder (hatART, 9/17), Stephen Marotto and Marilyn Nonken take a relatively flowing approach to tempo, not that they are in any hurry. Nonken has recorded Feldman’s piano output for the Mode label, and she understands this hermetic world from the inside. The sound is drier than for Arne Deforce and Yutaka Oya (Aeon, 8/09), but it complements Marotto’s lighter bowstrokes.
The early miniatures include graphic scores, one of which (Durations 2) is presented in two (not very) different realisations. The discovery (and first recording) is the Sonatina, which the 20-year-old Feldman wrote in 1946. In his helpful booklet essay, Samuel Clay Birmaher says that the solo part is ‘naively virtuosic and often unidiomatic or even impossible to play’. Marotto stylishly overcomes such challenges and leaves the impression of a composer searching for his own voice within the later music of Bartók and Prokofiev. Thank goodness he met Cage.
— Peter Quantrill, Gramophone, September 2024
With his 1981 masterpiece Patterns in a Chromatic Field, Morton Feldman continued his journey into long-form works that toyed with the real-time memory of his listeners. In these slowly cycling compositions, the sort of intricate irregularities woven into the patterns of Turkish rugs were translated into carefully measured sound. That piece for piano and cello occupies the bulk of this stunning double-CD release, exquisitely performed by Marilyn Nonken and Stephen Marotto, respectively. The set collects all of Feldman’s work for this configuration of instruments, including the first ever recording of his 1946 piece “Sonatina,” written in the shadow of Bartók. The 1951 work “Composition for cello & piano” is a set of seven super-short movements that feel like raw material he would later refine and embroider within long form works. There’s also “Two Pieces,” a pair of miniatures from 1948, when the composer was studying with Stefan Wolpe, and the previously unpublished 1972 vignette “For Stockhausen, Cage, Stravinsky, and Mary Sprinson.” The set opens and closes with two very different performances of “Durations 2,” one of his earliest experiments with graphic notation. While the pitch material is fully mapped out, there’s no indication of the duration for each note, with both performers taking their own path while remaining mindful not to tangle the sounds up. As evidenced here, no performance is ever the same. Still, the apex of Feldman’s writing for piano and cello remains Patterns, a viciously tough piece to play, casting a deceiving spell of serenity while requiring the players to maintain hyper-focused concentration.
— Peter Margasak, The Best Contemporary Classical Music on Bandcamp, March 2024, posted April 1st.
