Despite the explosion of Feldman’s popularity and recordings of his works in recent years, his orchestral music has not received the attention it deserves. This new CD presents four first recordings plus the first recording of Intersection I with full orchestra — all performed in the studio, a coproduction between Deutschlandradio and Mode. A disc of amazing discoveries!
Intersection I is a pivotal early graphic score, presented here in a realisation by Samuel Clay Birmaher. Muscular and dynamic, it sounds like nothing else in Feldman’s oeuvre — the raw sound of an orchestra untamed.
Structures and On Time and the Instrumental Factor (1969) are sister works from a transitional period in Feldman’s music. Both pieces explore an atmosphere of suspended time, with the instruments acting like an orchestra of tolling bells.
Voice and Instruments puts the sibylline voice in a wordless dialogue with the orchestra. Emphasis here is on the beauty of a single sound, with each moment connected to the next by a spider’s thread.
Orchestra is a walk through the orchestral landscape. Patterns come and go of their own accord as the music moves into unexplored territories. An important bridge between Feldman's middle and late works.
The American conductor Brad Lubman was Assistant Conductor to Oliver Knussen at the Tanglewood Music Center from 1989-94, and has since emerged as an unusually versatile conductor of orchestras and ensembles all over the world. He has worked with a great variety of illustrious musical figures including Pierre Boulez, Luciano Berio, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Michael Tilson Thomas, and John Zorn.
The Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin was founded in 1946 in the American sector of Berlin as the RIAS-Symphonie-Orchester. As its first principal conductor, from 1948, Ferenc Fricsay established the orchestra’s future course: commitment to contemporary and stylish interpretation of the traditional repertoire. Their expertise with contemporary music is evident in this committed and warm recording.
1st December 2011
****
“This collection closes one of the few significant gaps remaining in Morton Feldman's discography. Though most of his output, especially the serenely expansive late chamber scores, is well represented on disc, his relatively few pieces for orchestra have been largely ignored up to now...in both Voice and Instruments and Orchestra, from 1972 and 1979 respectively, the musical ideas are presented as images in a delicate, fastidiously coloured frieze”
Click on any of the works listed above for alternative recordings.
