Works for Piano

AMG Review of Works for Piano

Thom Jurek
All Music Guide

This first postmortem volume of the piano works of the Morton Feldman is an important one. Rather than attempt to be a complete representation of his work, it instead reveals the development of his aesthetic: From silence to silence, so to speak. The earliest work, from 1952, is "Intermission 5," where chance operation still had a small place in Feldman's work, but the notion that music is nothing but organized silence and must return to the stillness was already present. These graphic notational scores, made of blocks and lines shaded and hollow with other symbols, left much to the discernment of the musician playing the score, duration of pitch, timbre, etc. This is also true in the 1963 piece "To Phillip Guston," a short, three-minute-plus piece which has nothing in common with the later four hour long chamber work. The final two pieces here, 1977's "Piano" and 1986's "Palais De Mari for Francesco Clemente," are very different. Both have very precise notational instruction for rhythm, pitch, and meter, but the place for silence is the same. Music is what joins the elements of silence together, asserting itself only briefly, not as a breach of it, but a bridge between its territories. In other words, in Feldman's compositional view silence has its own origins in the sounds themselves. Marianne Schroeder's performances here are truly masterful. Her ability to sustain the ppp tension for entire works is without flaw -- particularly the longer ones, or even places beyond that signature where the only tension allowed is that of producing a sound from the keyboard. Given her deep understanding of these scores and her strict adherence to them, she has given us a generous first volume of Feldman's highly idiosyncratic and profound aesthetic, one that will be influential and instructive for the others who will undoubtedly open these doors for years to come.