Morton Feldman: Complete Music for Cello & PianoMorton FeldmanAlbumDescription: EDITORIAL REVIEWS This release brings together ALL of Morton Feldman's compositions for cello and piano including unpublished works and a first recording. Together these works tell the story of Feldman's music. They span 35 years - over half his lifetime - from when he was searching for his voice as a student to when he was opening new doors in the last years of his life. The album is bookended by two realizations of the graphic score Durations 2 (1960) giving an opportunity to hear what the flexibility of graphic notation can bring. The Sonatina (1946) is the earliest work here and a first recording. Displaying the influence of Béla Bartók Feldman wrote for the cello sound he loved without fully understanding the realities of playing the instrument. The resulting solo part is naively virtuosic and often even impossible to play. For this recording Stephen Marotto keeps as close as possible to the written score aiming to fulfill what Feldman heard in his mind's ear. By 1948 Feldman had been studying privately with the composer Stefan Wolpe for several years. The unpublished Two Pieces from that year is a fluctuating music held together not by logic but through it's carefully poised gestures - what Wolpe called shape. While the emotional drama of this and other early works would soon disappear from Feldman's music it was above all the idea of shape that remained with him for the rest of his life. In 1950 Feldman met John Cage who shepherded him into the world of the New York avant-garde. The unpublished compact Composition for cello and piano (1951) is a sudden breakthrough yet it already contains the DNA of his very last works in it's minimal material and blurred memories of sounds. For Stockhausen Cage Stravinsky and Mary Sprinson (1972) is an ephemeral unpublished piece a shard of music broken off from the main body of work Feldman was producing at the time. It consists of just two musical moments separated by silence - the same chord expressed in two different ways. At almost 1 hour and 29 minutes Patterns in a Chromatic Field (1981) is one of Feldman's late long-duration works and it is perhaps the best known of the works recorded here. Liner notes by Samuel Clay Birmaher.
