The Wigmore Hall was the first British concert venue to return to live
music-making after the lockdown last spring, and it has continued to host recitals ever since. Though it has been forced to postpone its concerts for the coming week, it intends to continue, as far as possible, with its planned 2021 season during the latest lockdown, too, all streamed live on YouTube and the hall’s own website. A day devoted to the music of Morton Feldman, performed by members of Apartment House (which is now one of the Wigmore’s associate ensembles), was an unmistakable signal of that serious intent.
Feldman is recognised as one of the most important figures in the music of the second half of the 20th century, a New York-born composer who had close connections with the abstract expressionist painters of the 1950s and 60s, while taking the musical ideas of John Cage in his own, entirely personal direction. Nowadays it’s Feldman’s late works, many of them lasting hours rather than minutes, that get most of the attention, while his earlier music, often more uncompromisingly radical in many ways, is rarely heard.
Apartment House’s three concerts did include a couple of those late
masterpieces. The second of them was devoted to a performance of Piano and String Quartet, composed in 1985, two years before Feldman’s death, while the final programme began with his final piano piece, Palais de Mari, from 1986, played with great tenderness by Mark Knoop. But, otherwise, the selection ranged right across his output, underlining that, however much the technical means of Feldman’s music may have changed across four decades – whether he used conventional or graphic notation, allowed the performer the freedom to choose pitches, rhythms and tempi or prescribed every detail – the sheer beauty of the sounds, and the intuitive formal logic underpinning them, were always unmistakable.
So the weightless chords of the works of the 1950s and early 60s, with their forbiddingly austere titles such as Projection, Extensions, or Vertical Thoughts, are just as spare and fragilely beautiful as those that open the 75-minute dialogue of Piano and String Quartet, while the spareness of the textures that underpin the disembodied solo voices (baritone Morgan Pearse and soprano Josephine Stephenson) in the two “song cycles” of 1962, The O’Hara Songs and For Franz Kline, may suggest a link with the music of Anton Webern, but clearly belong to the intensely private world.
But the discovery of the day was Feldman’s rarely heard solo-percussion piece The King of Denmark, from 1965. Its world of sometimes scarcely audible patterings, played entirely with the fingers without sharp attacks, so that the sounds seemed to float in space, was realised with wonderful subtlety by Simon Limbrick. But then all the day’s performances seemed to capture the unique essence of Feldman’s music, which seems more precious as time goes on.
Available on Wigmore Hall’s video library and YouTube until 8 February.
