Customer Reviews

String Quartet

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This recording of Feldman's First (numbered) String Quartet came out five years ago and I came across almost by chance (I encountered it through a library catalogue). I was always used to Feldman's music, to a point that the long works, such as "For Philip Guston," started to grow wonderfully on me and seem endlessly brief (how's that for an oxymoron). As with just about everything in Feldman's oeuvre, you don't simply listen to it to be entertained and satisfied, you commit to it, you live it, like being with a very good friend or watching a baseball game, where time is not of the greatest importance (it's too bad that Feldman never saw "Seinfeld," that show about nothing, and yet about everything). There is ebb, flow. There are surprises, some startling (take, for example, the first instance of a very loud eight note cluster twenty minutes in, which will occur three more times in the next fifteen minutes in different lengths, then disappear, never to be heard again after that), some reminiscent (like the fast pizzicato figures about 55' in, which reminds this writer of the first of Webern's Op.5), some items that come around at periodic intervals, other items come but once, never again to be encountered. And yet for all its length, I have listened to it many, many times in the last five years that it now seems to whiz past me like a Webern Bagatelle, that's how much I have become used to it. To listen to this piece is simply a matter of letting go (could there be something Zen in there?), letting things just happen, accepting, absorbing, breathing. In a way, simply be. Yet, as Feldman once put in an essay of his, "I have only given you the hanger, I have not given you the coat" (who am I to argue such logic?).

This work engages Feldman's end-of-his-life quest with longer durational lengths for his music. It is something you don't resolve all at once. Unless you are arrogant, and Feldman was not. The genre of the string quartet is a rough one for Feldman, he had no intimate relationship to strings the way for instance he had for piano solo, or orchestra. Feldman aesthetically it seems was an all or nothing kind of creator. And his chamber music(if we can call it that) is a middle purgatory-like ground for him. It is where he is the weakest. In listening to this quartet,I find the extended techniques hard to take for the lengths Feldman engages them. Fish-line thin harmonics are indeed very effective, but they soon overspend their welcome when they become the natural part of the sonic scenery. Feldman didn't (to my mind) untap the natural timbral beauty he did so powerfully in his piano music.

Feldman felt he had created a masterpiece with his first string quartet, which gained the nickname "100 minutes" based on its first performance in NYC, May 4th, 1980, because it lasted well over 90 minutes. This recording from 1993 by the Group for Contemporary Music (reissued by Naxos in 2006), isn't quite that long -- it's only 78 minutes! In February, 1981 the String Quartet was performed at the CalArts Contemporary Music Festival, and Feldman later said that the audience was so full of tension that it was "like a lynch mob." Throughout the 1970s Feldman had written many works for orchestra, including his outstanding "still life" concerto works (ie, "Cello and Orchestra," "Piano and Orchestra," "Violin and Orchestra, etc). These works grew longer toward the end, but it was the String Quartet that launched Feldman into his late period preoccupation with very long chamber works. (Thanks to Douglas Cohen for the very informative liner notes!)

The String Quartet of 1979 is full of variation, small to be sure, but in this sense transitional. The (in)famous second string quartet of 1983 represents the consolidation of Feldman's late "Turkish rug" period, marked by a reduction in variation to tiny changes on repeating patterns. This 1979 work has more in common with PATTERNS IN A CHROMATIC FIELD for cello and piano of 1981 (see my review) in its exploration of a wider range of possibilities, and more abrupt transitions, within the limited sonic terrain it occupies.

It took me some time to warm up to the late Feldman, but I came around. I love the 1970s still life works (see my review of the CPO set with Zender conducting), but I have embraced the string quartets, and the VIOLIN AND STRING QUARTET as well (see my review of the hatHUT recording). There is a recording of the second String Quartet by the Ives Ensemble on hatHUT that is "only" 5 hours long, on 4 discs instead of the 5 discs it takes to hold the 6-hour recording by the Flux Quartet for Mode, that has not appeared on this site. It is superb, and available via Cadence Magazine.

See my MORTON FELDMAN: A LISTENER'S GUIDE list for more recommendations and reviews of the music of one of the finest late 20th century composers, as well as my THE 12 BEST and 30 OF THE BEST LATE 20th/21st CENTURY COMPOSERS lists.

I disagree with the previous poster. This is Feldman at his best; those luscious harmonies - so marvelous with these string players. Pure heaven. I cannot believe this is the first recording of this work...