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DiscountDelight - Morton Feldman: Piano and String Quartet / Aki Takahashi, Kronos Quartet
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List Price: $16.98
Our Price: $11.94
Your Save: $ 5.04 ( 30% )
Availability: Usually ships in 5 to 10 days
Manufacturer: Nonesuch
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Audio CD
EAN: 0075597932027
Label: Nonesuch
Manufacturer: Nonesuch
Number Of Discs: 1
Publisher: Nonesuch
Release Date: 1993-09-28
Studio: Nonesuch
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: downright spooky
Comment: Like the concentrated energy of an atom, if this lengthy piece is condensed, note for note, down to 2.5 minutes, it sounds like Ike Turner's "Rocket 88" played backwards.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Extreme
Comment: This has to be one of the most extreme pieces of music ever composed and recorded. And you have to be very patient to listen to the whole thing from start to end. But the patient are always rewarded. If you want something unique, truly experimental, hypnotic, and captivating, get this. This is minimalism in its purest form.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A Thinking Cane
Comment: I think this is the CD to buy if you like puzzles, deep conversation with a valued interlocutor, or thinking problems through. Feldman's 12-tone music is really intended as a kind of intriquing, thought-nourishing background, not as the object of one's pointed concentration in and of itself. When you try to focus on it, you end up in a very tense mood. When you simply ALLOW it to be forgotten and recede, it's purpose comes into play.
Acedemic or retro pretention is not neccessary, as Feldman was the very picture of an American character bent on enjoying himself (the guy actually worked in his father's laundromat most of his life while working on his compositions in his private leisure) This piece (and pretty much all else Feldman composed) was never intended to financially support career music students, it was meant to be enjoyed without being the center of one's attention, attended to at one's convenience and for the sake of one's own private, utterly personal ends.
Aki Takahashi--expressive and thoughtful in his interpretation of the loose "suggestions" written by the composer--plays other of Feldman's compositions in an equally engaging manner, but this particular recording is a small gem of its own worth the price of admission.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Dangerously relaxing music
Comment: If you're looking for a nice, catchy tune, this is probably not for you.
The best way to listen to this is as a kind of sound sculpture, designed to get you very very very relaxed indeed.
Recently on holiday, lying on the beach, I had this playing on my i-pod and, on more than one occasion, became aware of not breathing - so frighteningly relaxed had I become. Not an altogether pleasant experience, but a pretty powerful indication of the music's effectiveness.
On the face of it, nothing much happens in this piece, nor is there is any discernible beginning or end. The basic pattern of sustained, broken piano chord echoed by strings basically stays the same, although, on the way, individual notes chime in from time to time and sounds and emphases shift almost indiscernibly. The conversation between piano and stings strongly resembles very relaxed, very slow breathing - hence the sensation of catching yourself apparently not doing the same!
On another level, this is a deeply meditative piece - a profound contemplation on the sensuality of sound. Its mesmeric repetitiveness effectively hypnotises the listener into a heightened sense of awareness for the everyday, largely blocked out noises that fill our ears. Indeed every incidental sound - the barking of a dog, traffic horns, a police siren roaring past - are engulfed in and become part of the music itself - and, in this way, the mundane becomes significant and beautiful.
Again, this really is not for everyone, but as a piece of sound sculpture it is truly a work of art.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Prismatic and Hauntingly Beautiful
Comment: This was my introduction to Feldman. I had the advantage of coming from an art background where the painter Mark Rothko had introduced me to the beauty and value of minimalism. This work appealed to me right away. This work embodies the hush of distant and twinkling notes, like a clear night sky.
Feldman was channelling the music of the spheres and helping to shape our contemporary musical aesthetics. His compositional genius is breaking music into its constituent pieces. Each note is a functional component in a divine machine of experiential timelessness. I find his work ecstatic. Feldman managed to disrobe classical composition and his pieces give us the experience of the naked tones of individual orchestral instruments, in much the same way a prism makes a spectrum of white light. But Feldman's work is not simply conceptual and deconstructionist in nature. Feldman asks us to slow down and take notice of the felt presence of immediate experience, the one thing that binds us all. He gives us the opportunity to take in delicate sounds strewn across a broad stroke of time because it feels really good to do that. This work is one of the most important pieces of the last century and will be a salient piece for centuries to come. Feldman gently brings us to a quiet place inside ourselves and that can take real effort in our modern world.
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Editorial Reviews:
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Written two years before his death in 1987, Morton Feldman's Piano and String Quartet is a shimmering, pristine musical event. Contrasting Aki Takahashi's widely-spaced piano arpeggios with Kronos Quartet's extended chords, Feldman allows lingering sounds from either the piano or the strings to haze over many of the piece's near-silences. Kronos plays their parts with tremulous fragility, often making pointedly clear the viola's musical valley between the leading violins and the trailing cello. By the time Feldman composed this piece, he was deeply committed to extended works--chamber pieces that could telescope motifs and worry their tonality so that it warbled between hauntingly atonal and familiarly tonal singing. This is a powerful, evening piece, one that can set an extravagantly crystalline musical mood. --Andrew Bartlett
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