There’s a lot going for this recording of four short works by Morton Feldman, most notably the committed performances by the New Millennium Ensemble. These six players create plainspoken statements that complement Feldman very well. His sustained single notes that pierce silence, or the layers of sound from two or three instruments that simply hover in the air would suffer from a less clean performance. But these musicians cut right to the chase. Another plus, even for listeners who love Feldman’s contemplative qualities, is these works’ brevity. This disc is slightly less than 60 minutes long (which, by the way, makes it only one-sixth the length of Feldman’s String Quartet II!), and yet I appreciate being able to concentrate more intently, in briefer bursts, on Feldman’s skillful shifts of color and light, shade and stillness.
On the minus side, inane, poorly written notes do little if anything to illuminate the work or aesthetics of this American original: who knew that his approach to music “was not like that of the usual composer”–or that there was such a thing as a “usual composer”? (For those interested in exploring Feldman in depth, The Music of Morton Feldman, edited by Thomas Delio, is an excellent resource.) Koch’s sound is balanced well enough, but the major drawback is that the disc was engineered without regard to the fact that Feldman’s music is very quiet. You need to turn your volume control up high to hear anything at all, at which point the timpani and snare in both For Frank O’Hara and Instruments I get quite blurry, and the bass clarinet in Bass Clarinet and Percussion assumes a hard, unpleasant edge. [3/23/2002]
