Flute and Orchestra / Cello and Orchestra / Piano and Orchestra

"Hans Zender has done an admirable job in recording successvily neglected contemporary works with the Rundfunk Symphony Orchestra from Saarbrucken. In fact you can quite soundly say this will be the only encounter with these works,unless you scour the new music festival circuit in Europe for months.And no composer is more neglected than Morton Feldman. Well not now since his death in 1988,where practically his entire body of work has been recorded. These various works featuring a solo instrument are really not concertos I'd like to suggest that these works subvert interestingly enough the concerto concept, and they do it rigorously. The Feldman you might know is one attenuated to open beauty expansive with floating disarming-like sounds in all registers with a deep feel for instrumental colour and imbalance in a positive way. His aesthetic for his music has engaged visual thinking particularly the American Expressionists who he knew intimately,Guston,Rothko,Franz Klein and Motherwell. Feldman saw no creative value in traditionalist post European theoretical perspectives one engaging the serialized thinking. His music especially the piano solo works sought a new aesthetic,one of formless yet structured dimensions. Sometimes he embraces musical gestures too large for their frames, but this is the experimentalist cast of his music,one shared by his early mentor John Cage. Yet Feldman has always been committed to the aesthtic object whereas for Cage it was always an indeterminate by-product of his art,one of blissful surprise. The "Oboe and Orchestra" is oddly a deeply disturbing work and you really don't recognize the Feldman I've been describing. The oboe soloist exhorts a tortured sound screaming,twisting,contorting and tearing its sounds in the strident upper registers. The orchestra as accomplice fully gives graphic support to this with ominous low thunderous rolls,and end-of-the-world-like sheets of brooding chords.Likewise the "Flute and Orchestra" engages an anxiety-ridden melodic discourse like something serious has happened yet we quite don't know the details, and again the orchestra supports this Cassandra-like exhortations of the state of the world. Yet the flute is beautiful with full-throated low register gestures in its most rich register. This is a Feldman I never encountered before one reflecting the negative expressionistic side of the lifeworld. The "Piano and Orchstra" returns to the Feldmanesque beauty at work, yet midpoint gives way to snarling brass and a menacing muted trumpets with half-steps suggestive of Stravinsky's "Rite".Yet the piano is bell-like and child-like,with painstakingly crafted timbres which "accompany" the piano, these orchestral moments are more as "supports" or screens or blankets of sounds consistent with Feldman's penchant for the colour fields one might encounter in Rothko. Oddly again the Harp is a hidden accomplice,fascinating how when a tone is exposed it becomes a revelation,like a resolution within the context of Feldman's anxiety-bound concept at work here. All the soloist here enter and project as if they are mere conduits, no personalities emerge,yet being soloist forces this context on our musical perceptions."
(Amazon.com)