1. Piano Three Hands
2. For Bunita Marcus
3. Early Piano Music 1950-64
4. Piano 77 & Palais de Mari
5. For Bunita Marcus
6. For John Cage
7. Piano & String Quartet 1
8. Patterns in a Chromatic Field
9. Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello
10. Durations II, Piece for Violin & Piano, Projection IV, Extensions I, Vertical Thoughts II, Four Instruments, Spring of Chosroe, The Viola in my Life
11. Trio
12. Triadic Memories parts 1 & 2
13. For Philip Guston Part 1
14. For Philip Guston Part 2
15. For Philip Guston Part 3
16. For Philip Guston Part 4
17. For Christian Wolff Part 1
18. For Christian Wolff Part 2
19. For Christian Wolff Part 3
20. Palais de Mari
21. Two Pianos and other pieces 1953-1969 Disc 1
22. Two Pianos and other pieces 1953-1969 Disc 2
23. For Piano and Orchestra
1. Piano Three Hands.
7”54’. Performed by Morton Feldman and John Tilbury,. Recorded in Berlin by Sender Fries Berlin, in 1971.
Click to buy as 320kbps mp3 / FLAC from ReR Megacorp
2. For Bunita Marcus.
90” approx, Performed by John Tilbury, in Dublin on April 1st, 2007. Recorded by David Reid
Click to buy as 320kbps mp3 / FLAC from ReR Megacorp
3. Early piano music 1950-64
64”. Perfomed by John Tilbury. Recorded by Hanno Stroher at Tonstudio Stroher in Innsbruck in April, 1995.
1. Piano Piece (1963)
2, 3, 4. Three Extensions for Piano (1954)
5. Extensions 3 (1952)
6. Intermission 6 (1953)
7. Intermission 2 (1953)
8, 9, 10, 11. Last Pieces (1959)
12. Piano Piece 1956 A (for Cynthia)
13. Piano Piece 1956B
14. Intermission 5 (1952)
15. Piano Piece 1955
16. Piano Piece 1964
17, 18. Two Intermissions (1950)
19. Vertical Thoughts 4 (1963)
20. Intersection 3 (1953)
21. Piano Piece 1952
Click to buy album as 320kbps mp3 / FLAC from ReR Megacorp
4. Piano 77 and Palais de Mari
29” & 24”. Performed by John Tilbury. Recorded at Tonstudio Stroher, Innsbruck in October 1996 and March 1997 by Hanno Stroher.
Click to buy as 320kbps mp3 / FLAC from ReR Megacorp
5. For Bunita Marcus
77”. Performed by John Tilbury. Recorded at Tonstudio Stroher, Innsbruck on 15 October, 1990 by Hanno Stroher.
Click to buy as 320kbps mp3 / FLAC from ReR Megacorp
6. For John Cage
89“. Performed by John Tilbury (piano) and The Smith Quartet (Ian Humphries (violin), Darragh Morgan (violin), Nic Pendlebury (viola) and Dierdre Cooper (cello). Recorded at the Huddersfield Festival of Contemporary Music in 2006 by Sebastian Lexer.
Click to buy as 320kbps mp3 / FLAC from ReR Megacorp
7. Piano and String Quartet 1
90”. Recorded at the Huddersfield Festival of Contemporary Music in 2006 by Sebastian Lexer.
Click to buy as 320kbps mp3 / FLAC from ReR Megacorp
8. Patterns in a Chromatic Field 1981
88”. Performed by John Tilbury (piano) and Dierdre Cooper (cello). Recorded at the Huddersfield Festival of Contemporary Music in 2006 by Sebastian Lexer.
Click to buy as 320kbps mp3 / FLAC from ReR Megacorp
9. Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello 1987
93”. Performed by John Tilbury (piano), Darragh Morgan (violin), Nic Pendlebury (viola) and Dierdre Cooper (cello). Recorded at the Huddersfield Festival of Contemporary Music in 2006 by Sebastian Lexer
Click to buy as 320kbps mp3 / FLAC from ReR Megacorp
10. Durations II (1960) – John Tilbury (piano) and Dierdre Cooper (cello); Piece for Violin and Piano (1950) – John Tilbury (piano), Ian Humphries (violin); Projection IV (1951) John Tilbury (piano), Ian Humphries (violin); Extensions 1 (1951) – John Tilbury (piano), Ian Humphries (violin); Vertical Thoughts II (1963) – John Tilbury (piano), Ian Humphries (violin); Four Instruments (1975) (John Tilbury (piano), Dierdre Cooper (cello), Ian Humphries (violin) and Nic Pendlebury (viola); Spring of Chosroe (1978) – John Tilbury (piano), Ian Humphries (violin); The Viola in My Life (1970) – John Tilbury (piano), Nic Pendlebury (viola).
Recorded at the Huddersfield Festival of Contemporary Music in 2006 by Sebastian Lexer.
Click to buy as 320kbps mp3 / FLAC from ReR Megacorp
Patterns in a Chromatic Field and Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello
I tried, once, to trace Arnold Schoenberg’s saying to source about there being plenty music left to be written in C major, and found the task unexpectedly frustrating.
No one seemed prepared to clarify where Schoenberg said, or wrote this statement, or anything about the context that led him to articulate an idea, which if read literally, could be the gainsayer of everything his life’s work was about. With internet searches unable to agree even on what Schoenberg said, or wrote, I realised how bizarre it is this statement central to New Music mythology should have become so marooned in history. And the one resource we now lean on for instant historical clarification, the internet, merely added to the misreadings and muddle.
Sitting down to begin these booklet notes some twenty minutes ago, I googled “Morton Feldman said”. I was interested; interested to know what was out there, and how many Feldman quotes I thought I knew might be implanted inside my brain in some garbled, out-of-context form. And like tablets of New Music scripture, Feldman’s wise and wisecracking words poured into my browser. For what it’s worth, “Morton Feldman said” generates many more ‘hits’ than “Arnold Schoenberg said”. Not bad for a composer who even ten, fifteen, years ago was still underground and largely misunderstood
In my day-job as music journalist, I’ve come to appreciate how addictively quotable Feldman can be. That totemic quote about his music aspiring to be about scale, not form – which actually reads “up to one hour you think about form, but after an hour-and-a-half it’s scale” – is a very useful, written by somebody who would absolutely know, quote to have at your disposal to insert into an article about any music that questions the timeframe over which music normally flows.
“What was great about the fifties is that for one brief moment – maybe, say, six weeks – nobody understood art.” Again, Feldman’s incisive, tangentially waspish prose puts a frame around an otherwise nebulous idea: that most artists know the parameters and boundaries of their art perhaps just a little too well, a thought backed up by another quote “Do we have anything in music that really wipes everything out? That just cleans everything away?” Some statements – “Polyphony sucks!” – are brutally blunt, others – “I can live without art, but not the myth about art” – are wantonly enigmatic; Feldman’s anecdote about telling Karlheinz Stockhausen not to push sounds around, and Stockhausen’s apparent reply ‘what, not even a little bit?’, was designed to tell us where Feldman’s attitude to sound stood vis-à-vie European Modernism…and to lance Stockhausen’s bulbous ego.
Why am I telling you this? To make the point that, as these performances of Patterns in a Chromatic Field and Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello amply demonstrate, however well we think we know Feldman through his statements, his music is impossible to carry in your head and remains essentially unknowable. ‘Essentially’ in the sense of: that is the essential thing about it.
Feldman the man was a showman; Feldman the composer was an aesthete whose compositions were secret and private. He died in 1987, twelve years before I started writing about music, but had I been fortunate enough to interview him, I’m sure he would have provided brilliant copy – the sort of interview that fills one with joy during the arduous ache of transcription; fully-formed sentences, his compositional nuts-and-bolts convincingly explained, one-liners delivered with the facility of Woody Allen. But would he have let me past the mask, even an inch? His own Patterns in a Chromatic Field note suggests not. Programme notes are meant to illuminate; but I wonder if Feldman used the opportunity to compound, not clarify, the riddles and enigmas?
The basics are simple enough. Composed in 1981, Patterns in a Chromatic Field is for cello and piano. Feldman prefaces his note with: “Take an object/Do something to it/Do something else to it/Do something else to it” before outlining the patterns he places within a ‘chromatic field’: the raw data of pitch groups, time signatures and chord durations. Riffing off Gertrude Stein’s genesis of a language – “In the beginning was the word. Then they put two words together, then they made a sentence, then they made a paragraph and the forgot the word” – Feldman then ‘tells’ us how he assembled his piece. “Do it one way and do it another,” he writes. “Spell it one way then spell it another. Orchestrate it one way, orchestrate it another way. Use this kind of rhythm and then use another kind of rhythm. Do it on a chain one after the other, do it less on a chain, do it in a simultaneity”….
…in other words, what’s the fuss? Composing’s easy. You need material and you need number-crunching techniques that guarantee you permutations of that basic material and, bingo, there’s your piece. Feldman even provides a failsafe ‘good composing guide’ – “My definition of composition: the right note in the right place with the right instrument!” But had he indeed constructed his music like flat-pack furniture I doubt we’d be interested in it today – which is why I don’t believe a word Feldman says. The intensity with which he engaged with his material is clear in the deep listening it imposes upon us, his listeners – the mind-boggling ‘rightness’ of his instinct about how a semitone shift either way can completely change the timbre, or not; how seemingly insignificant motific developments might impact on the structure an hour later, or not.
Far from a Pot Noodle approach to compositional technique – just add boiling water and stir – Feldman wasn’t happy unless he pushed himself towards devising a new recipe for every project. Many of his pronouncements feel designed to deny, or deflect attention from, the complexity of his relationship to his material. To twist one of Feldman’s statements against himself – he understood that understanding his art too clearly was a potential creative compromise. There was value in hiding the mystery from others, and to an extent, from himself.
Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello was his last piece. The motifs are arguably sparser, and certainly there are less of them than Feldman typically used; but the relationship between text and sound remains characteristically inscrutable. The published score has 34 pages paginated with orderly consistency: three systems, each with nine bars. But this visual uniformity bears no correlation to what we hear. Displaced, changing time signatures and double-bar repeats torpedo the rationality of the grid. Into that equation factor in those imponderables of structure and sound I mentioned in relation to Patterns in a Chromatic Field, and a fundamental truth about Feldman’s music emerges – however faithfully one analyses his scores, however forcefully Feldman persuades us that his music could be a sonic adjunct to the New York School painters he admired, experiencing his sounds is always quite different. The link between perceptible systems and the sound of the music itself breaks. Then all you’ve got are your ears.
Which leads to a final consideration: why Feldman on a label primarily concerned with the documentation of British free improvisation? There are, of course, personal reasons. Label proprietor Eddie Prévost and John Tilbury have an association that goes back to the mid-1960s. In 1980 Tilbury joined AMM, the improvisation collective of which, in 1965, Prévost was a founder member. But there are robust musical reasons too. Feldman’s concerns about sound and structure – ears fantastically adrift, while keeping alert to the surroundings and open to the possibility of change – is second nature to improvisers. Feldman has more in common spiritually with AMM than he does with, say, Elliott Carter or perhaps even John Cage; and AMM with Feldman than it does with other approaches to improvised music.
As Morton Feldman famously said: “You need a little drama. Not much. But you need a little drama. Just a little bit.’
11. Trio
94”. Performed by John Tilbury (piano), Dierdre Cooper (cello) and Ian Humphries (violin). Recorded at the Huddersfield Festival of Contemporary Music in 2006 by Sebastian Lexer
Click to buy as 320kbps mp3 / FLAC from ReR Megacorp
12.Triadic Memories Parts 1 & 2
75″/29″
John Tilbury Live Recording St John’s, Smith Sq. London June 10 2008 recorded by Sebastian Lexer
Click to buy as 320kbps mp3 / FLAC from ReR Megacorp
On TRIADIC MEMORIES
In 1996, in preparation for a talk I was to give on Feldman and Skempton I wrote down the following notes as a kind of aide-mémoire
On Softness
Softness – also length, and brevity. But ‘not for its own sake’.
‘Virtuosity of restraint’ (Skempton)
Alice (in Wonderland) had to accustom herself to new dimensions.
Soft ‘as possible’. Relative. Degree and quality of softness depends on the acoustical and the psychological. Awareness of this dynamic quality within softness creates an extraordinary variety.
Softness draws the audience into the music – it encourages attentiveness and alertness. It also demands a ‘transcendental’ listening in its search for a revelatory experience.
Softness heightens consciousness; also enhances the consciousness, for example, of the idiosynchracies of the instrument at which one sits.
On the unintended
This respect for the unintended embodies the notion for the interpreter of nowness, of uniqueness.
Accidentalness is an active component, to be convincingly contextualized. The music responds to the contingencies of venue, of temperature, etc. etc. This, together with an emphasis on the sensual and physical qualities of the art of performance, creates an indivisibility of musician and instrument and at best of music and audience; an at one-ness.
Accidentalness need not cause embarrassment; rather the accidental (unintended sounds) is to be enjoyed, nourished, sometimes indulged.
The ‘accidental’ is a corollary of the extreme softness which Feldman demands and which necessarily involves risk. The player is playing on the edge, on the frontier between sound and no sound.
The dialectic of the extreme fingertip sensitivity and control – intention – and the recognition of the impossibility, the undesirability of control, the vulnerability of intention and the inevitability of failure. This gives the music its unique quality.
On interpretation
Thus it is a foolhardy and naive interpreter who attempts to predetermine and structure his interpretation of this music, for it unfolds organically, responding to the idiosyncrasies of the instrument, the shape and acoustic of the room, the general ambience. All are active components in the music-making. The music takes on a quasi-autonomous nature as if the musician is ‘tracking’ rather than consciously, ‘professionally’, producing the sounds; he/she steers a hazardous course in which phrasing and articulation, pedalling, are ‘situational’.
Rather than expressing a ‘form’ Skempton’s pieces express ‘a state of being’, and in this he resembles Morton Feldman. The music creates space and release for both performer and listener, providing an antidote to the congestion that blights our lives; and thereby satisfying a contemporary need.
On notation
In Feldman, as in Skempton, that which is given in the notation is essential; no rhetoric, nothing superfluous, the unity of pitch and register strikes me as a key characteristic and feature of the thinking of both composers.
Skempton’s language is more prosaic, more down-to-earth, referential; this makes his music more accessible, on one level, but for Skempton, in terms of what his music is really about, it is more difficult – for him, and for his audience.
In Skempton’s notations what is left unsaid is what he means but does not, cannot, write. What he means is precisely a lack of explicit intention; rather, his intention is ‘blurred’. So the performer misses the point if he tries to figure out what Skempton ‘means’ by this ‘lack of information’. The player is engaged in the act of interpreting; the material given him is no more and no less than he needs.
General
At its best Feldman’s music can take our breath away, providing a revelatory experience, a transparency which has no need of argument.
Feldman seems to occupy a metaphysical space and encroaches on the domain of spirituality normally associated with religion. Thus art wrests spirituality from religion; spirituality is not the private property of religion.
Blake regarded human imagination as the essential divine quality by which God manifested himself in Man. This was tantamount to equating man with God and art with religion.
Perhaps with Feldman one can make a case for a kind of musical utopianism. He embraces all sounds; what he does is to focus on certain sounds so that there are different shades, varying degrees of focus. “If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to
13. For Philip Guston, Part 1 (78″)
Performed John Tilbury, Carla Rees and Simon Allen at the Huddersfield Festival of Contemporary Music on November 21, 2012. Recorded by Sebastian Lexer.
Click to buy as 320kbps mp3 / FLAC from ReR Megacorp
14. For Philip Guston, Part 2 (75″)
Click to buy as 320kbps mp3 / FLAC from ReR Megacor
15. For Philip Guston, Part 3 (71″)
Click to buy as 320kbps mp3 / FLAC from ReR Megacorp
16. For Philip Guston, Part 4 (65″)
Click to buy as 320kbps mp3 / FLAC from ReR Megacorp
On For Philip Guston
In a radio discussion Feldman once referred to what he discerned, in many cases, as the professional musician’s apparent fear of his instrument, a fear that creates, as he put it, a distance between performer and instrument. He talked of the need, in his own music, for a closeness of player to instrument, an at-oneness embodied in a radical commitment to the muscular, physical and essentially sensual qualities of the art of performance. There must be a feeling of adventure, of freshness; a vibrant, high-risk strategy in which each performance is imbued with a quality of uniqueness. As performers we know the piece; on the basis of week after week of rehearsal we know the score, we know the organization, the way it evolves, the intimidating enormity of the scale of the work. So how do you approach performance? Concentration is of the essence; concentrating on the moment, on the physical nowness, on the finger as it touches the keyboard, the hand on the musical instrument, the key moment at which pure cognition takes place before the reflecting action of consciousness. The consideration of scale is immaterial, except, perhaps, on a subliminal level. (Speaking personally as an improvising musician, at its best it’s as if I am not aware that I am performing; it’s about being, and doing; the concept of mistakes, right or wrong notes, for example, let alone formal considerations, just doesn’t come into it.)
Likewise, concentration is a key issue for Feldman the composer. It’s the word he uses most when he speaks about composing: “I approach my compositions where I’m starting off with no ideas at all. What I don’t want is ideas. But what I do need is utmost concentration. If I begin to lose concentration that’s when I…or rather put it this way, when I find that I’m crossing chords out, notes out, then that means that I’m actually losing my concentration… When I work I forget (the angel forgetfulness)…I consider sitting around waiting, not having a thought in your head…to me that’s work. I think the work aspect is the degree of concentration you put into making this music possible.”
So with Feldman there is this element of spontaneity and of subjectivity (although in the later works the huge scale does necessitate the consideration of ‘form’). When he sits down to compose he is thinking in real time, acoustic time, not compositional time. Significantly, Feldman wouldn’t talk about compositional reality; in fact, he said there was no such thing; he preferred to talk about acoustical reality. “And so for me the real is not the object, the real for me is not the compositional system, the real for me is to what degree, almost in Kierkegaardian terms, I can exist, I can plunge, I can leap into this thing which I call life, which I call the environment…So don’t talk to me about systems, don’t talk to me about aesthetics, don’t talk to me about life, in fact don’t even talk to me about art, and let’s end it with this thought: that it all has to do with nerve, nothing else, that’s what it’s all about; so in a sense it’s a character problem.”
Genuine spontaneity (unpredictability) is something which is absolutely crucial. It is at the heart of Feldman’s music: the idea that every sound has a unique quality. There can be nothing of the routine in Feldman performance. As in life itself there can be no blueprint; there are so many contingencies, so many things that can happen which can alter the way you play a particular chord, make a particular sound, in relation to any previous performance. Playing Feldman is about living your life. And it is known for people to weep when they hear it.
I recall a BBC radio discussion when the composer Cornelius Cardew, one of the greatest exponents of Feldman’s music, posited the inadequacy of art in relation to the awesome power of nature and natural phenomena. Kant, too, had called into question the primacy of the experience of art in relation to the experience of nature. Perhaps then it is the kinship of Feldman’s music with nature, rather than with art, its aspiration to nature (like the paintings in the Rothko chapel in Houston, where people sit and weep), which is able to generate such an extreme response. John Tilbury March 3rd 2013
17. For Christian Wolff, Part 1 (69″)
Performed by John Tilbury and Carla Rees at the Osterfestival Hall, in Tirol on March 16, 2016. Recorded by Giovanni Da Rovere.
Click to buy as 320kbps mp3 / FLAC from ReR Megacorp
18 For Christian Wolff Part 2 (61″)
Click to buy as 320kbps mp3 / FLAC from ReR Megacorp
19 For Christian Wolff Part 3 (70″)
Click to buy as 320kbps mp3 / FLAC from ReR Megacorp
ON PERFORMING FOR CHRISTIAN WOLFF
“As I was writing the piece I found that for the first time in my life I consciously decided to write a piece that was austere….And then when I got back, for whatever reason, I titled it For Christian Wolff.”
We may balk at Feldman’s description here. For our contemporary sensibilities the word ‘austere’,(e.g. the scourge of ‘austerity’), does not sit easily with a work of such pristine beauty.
Feldman talks about his ‘monolithic’ music of the sixties where, as in the later work, Palais de Mari and for Christian Wolff, for example, he avoids fragmentation. ‘You can have a lot of detail’, he says, ‘and it is not noticeable….’ The moves are within the monolith, keeping it going, but they are discreet. Feldman calls for Christian Wolff a ‘rondo of everything’. Everything is recycled and comes back but modulated in some way so that the listener hears them differently. In relation to for Christian Wolff the question of form arises and a ‘rondo of everything’ sums it up succinctly. (‘Form’, someone once waspishly stated, is what musicologists use to keep themselves in business.)
It might be said, by those who are concerned with such matters, that Feldman’s compositional strategies serve to dissolve form. Perhaps it is the organicity of the morphology of Feldman’s music which makes formal analysis irrelevant? The trajectory of a Feldman performance may be influenced by the very first bar, by the unintended emphasis of a note, an idiosynchratic blurring of the rhythmic profile, a dynamic which is not quite what one had intended, or, simply, by a mistakeAll this is a million miles away from ‘form’.
‘Scale’ is something else; scale is about range and scope. One can feel or anticipate the potency of scale as a performer, as one sits at the piano, or with the flute, waiting to begin for Christian Wolff. This awareness of scale (rather than form) is what can profoundly influence the role of the performer, which is to present the work in all its richness and potentiality; its multi-meanings. Formal concerns do not easily escape accusations of superficiality. Feldman said: “the form is easy – just a division of things into parts. But scale is another matter.” So can one find different musical strategies for going ‘beyond’ form in Feldman’s later music? Rather than expressing a ‘form’ this music creates space and release for both performer and listener, providing an antidote to the congestion that blights our lives; and thereby satisfying a contemporary need. The form is dissolved; and there is no blueprint.
There are many bittersweet moments in For Christian Wolff and during our extensive rehearsals Carla Rees and I became intensely aware of this. And there are long stretches of stasis, the ‘frozen moment’ of stasis (It was Pollock who helped Feldman to understand and incorporate the notion and practice of ‘stasis’ in his music). But an awareness of stasis also presupposes an alertness, a readiness to act, to respond to the unexpected. So it’s a kind of paradoxical situation; enjoying, living the present, but being ready for a future fraught with uncertainty, in which stasis can be ruptured. To negotiate these changes is a challenge to the interpreter.
At the beginning of For Christian Wolff Feldman prescribes, as he often does, the tempo 63-66. And the dynamic marking is ppp, with sustained pedal throughout. In a discussion with Greek composer, Iannis Xenakis, Feldman remarked that a performance of his music had been, in his opinion, “a little stiff…I wanted them to breathe with each other more naturally. .Breathe rather than count…They counted correctly. Maybe that was it, that it was a little too mechanical in the counting.”
Bearing this in mind, Carla and I determine the ‘same’ pulse in different ways, so the pulse fluctuates; our individual pulses interact. We prefer not to count; we feel the pulse.The music floats above the pulse. And the die is cast in the opening minutes. We are feeling our way forward together. This means, in practice, that sometimes the tones collide, or, for example, what should be a quaver sounds more like a grace note.
To achieve a balance, particularly between piano and celeste, makes demands both technically and artistically because the relationship between the three instruments is a shifting one. Right at the start, with the little chromatic motif, the celeste tones are masked by the piano and flute – they seem to live in the shadow of the music – with the celeste faintly echoing the piano tone (This is of course mainly because of the low dynamic I have chosen to set the volume control on this recording). In fact, the celeste tones are variously inaudible, but I know they are there!
During the (recorded) performance there are places when the flute dynamic involuntarily drops, which hadn’t happened in rehearsal. I have to make an instant decision in respect of the piano/celeste relationship to the flute. Elsewhere in the piece the intensity of the flute sound diminishes. This necessarily elicits a response from me because the sound is ‘one’ (not ‘three’). And, in return, Carla has to deal with my idiosyncratic moments/decisions/mistakes. In general the celeste volume seems to be subdued. I try to make a virtue of this; it provides another dimension. (Occasionally, embarrassingly, in the heat of the moment I get the piano and celeste the wrong way round.)
Within this togetherness; something of significance is happening. Genuine spontaneity (unpredictability) is something which is absolutely crucial. It is at the heart of Feldman’s music: the idea that every sound has a unique quality. There can be nothing routine in Feldman performance. There are so many contingencies, so many things that can happen which can alter the way you play a particular chord, make a particular sound, in relation to any previous performance. Playing Feldman is about living your life. And it is known for people to weep when they hear it.
Like nature, Feldman’s music has an indestructible quality, for all its surface fragility. As a personality Feldman was abrasive but brittle; he could be insensitive to the feelings of others but one sensed in him a vulnerability. “The real for me is how I can leap into this thing which I call life. Music must have sensuous dimension”, he once said.
The sensuality of touching the instrument. Often, before I start playing the piano I gently caress the instrument. Comparable to love-making, you approach your lover with a degree of trepidation; there is no clear objective. Then, the first touch. These notes may be read in conjunction with those of the two previous Feldman releases: Triadic Memories and For Philip Guston. Each contains material germane to the other two.
20. Palais de Mari
27”. Performed by John Tilbury in Reykjavik on February 2012. Recordist unknown
A unique venue, beautiful instrument, wonderfully attentive audience. Possibly the best performance I have given of this piece.
Click to buy as 320kbps mp3 / FLAC from ReR Megacorp
21. Two Pianos and other pieces 1953-1969 Disc 1 (64″)
Performed by John Tilbury, Philip Thomas, Catherine Laws, Mark Knoop,(piano) Anton Lukoszevieze, Seth Woods, (cello) Mira Benjamin, Linda Jankowska, (violin) Rodrigo Constanzo, Taneli Clarke, (percussion) Naomi Atherton (horn) Barrie Webb (trombone) St Paul’s Hall Huddersfield University, 27-29 June 2014 recorded by Simon Reynell
Click to buy as 320kbps mp3 / FLAC from ReR Megacorp
22. Two Pianos and other pieces 1953-1969 Disc 2 (71″)
Click to buy as 320kbps mp3 / FLAC from ReR Megacorp
23. Piano and Orchestra
32″
BBC John Tilbury with BBC Scottish Orchestra under Ilan Volkov at the Albert Hall Prom season August 20, 2010 recorded by BBC
Click to buy as 320kbps mp3 / FLAC from ReR Megacorp