Feldman Complete Piano

This release brings together ALL of Morton Feldman’s compositions for cello and piano, including unpublished works and a first recording.

Igor Levit’s double album “Encounter” seeks sounds that give inner strength and support for the soul. In works by Bach to Max Reger, based on poignant vocal compositions, the desire for encounters and human togetherness is given expression – at a time when isolation is the order of the day. The result is a very personal recital.

Miles Davis - Seven Steps: The Complete Columbia Recordings Of Miles Davis 1963-1964 (2004) {7CD Columbia C7K 90840}
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© 1963-64, 2004 Columbia / Legacy / Sony Music | C7K 90840
Jazz / Hard Bop / Modal Music / Trumpet

Seven Steps: The Complete Columbia Recordings of Miles Davis 1963-1964 is an anomaly among the retrospective sets that have been issued from the late artist's catalog. It does not focus on particular collaborations (Miles with Coltrane, Gil Evans, the second quintet), complete sessions of historic albums (Bitches Brew, In a Silent Way, and Jack Johnson), or live runs (Plugged Nickel and Montreux). Instead, it is a portrait of the artist in flux, in the space between legendary bands, when he was looking for a new mode of expression, trying to find the band that would help him get there. These seven CDs begin after the demise of bands that included John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Bill Evans, Paul Chambers, Jimmy Cobb, and Wynton Kelly, after his landmark Gil Evans period, and even after his attempts at creating a new band with everyone from Frank Strozier and Harold Mabern to Sonny Rollins and J.J. Johnson.

Morton Feldman - Piano - Marianne Schroeder (1990) {hat ART CD 6035}
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© 1990 Hat Hut Records | hat ART CD 6035
Classical / Contemporary Classical / Avant-Garde / Minimalism

This first postmortem volume of the piano works of the Morton Feldman is an important one. Rather than attempt to be a complete representation of his work, it instead reveals the development of his aesthetic: From silence to silence, so to speak. The earliest work, from 1952, is "Intermission 5," where chance operation still had a small place in Feldman's work, but the notion that music is nothing but organized silence and must return to the stillness was already present. These graphic notational scores, made of blocks and lines shaded and hollow with other symbols, left much to the discernment of the musician playing the score, duration of pitch, timbre, etc.

Gil Shaham took up the violin aged seven and a mere three years later debuted as soloist with the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra. Less than a year later, Shaham performed with Israel's foremost orchestra, the Israel Philharmonic, conducted by Zubin Mehta. Shaham has since performed with many of the world's leading orchestras. His recordings for Deutsche Grammaphon reveal a broad repertoire and not least an affinity to the music of the twentieth century.

RCO - Anthology of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Volume 6, 1990-2000 (2011) {14CD Box Set, RCO 11004} (Complete Artwork)
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© 1990-2000, 2011 Radio Netherlands Music / RCO LIve | RCO 11004
Classical / Orchestral

I bought this shortly after my first visit to the Concertgebouw itself, when I was bowled over by the hall's superb acoustics and atmosphere. So these live broadcast recordings were pungent evocations of the experience. But even without that, this is a box worth having, if you can afford it. The first two discs alone are dynamite: a marvellously dramatic, idiomatic account of Bartok's Bluebeard's Castle with Ivan Fischer and Hungarian soloists, followed by one of the best Mahler Fifths I've heard, from Tennstedt in 1990.

Kazuo Fukushima - Works for Flute and Piano - Eberhard Blum, Steffen Schleiermacher (1992) {hat ART CD 6114}
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© 1992 Hat Hut Records | hat ART CD 6114
Classical / Contemporary Classical / Avant-Garde / Chamber Music

These solo and duo works by the self-taught composer Kazuo Fukushima represent the influence of noh music and Buddhist dharma on his life's work. They are self contained universes where the notion of the infinite is contained within a single note and its interaction with another one or with silence itself. The earliest of these works here, "Requiem" from 1956, is a flute solo based in serial technique, a simple 12-tone row repeated over the course of five-and-a-half minutes. In his duo for flute and piano, "Ekagra From 1957," we see the influence of other composers such as Toru Takemitsu and even Varese come into play.