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| Morton Feldman: Piano and String Quartet / Aki Takahashi, Kronos Quartet | 
 enlarge | Creators: Joan Jeanrenaud, Morton Feldman, Kronos Quartet, Aki Takahashi, Aki Takahaski, Hank Dutt, David Harrington, John Sherba
Label: Nonesuch
Category: Music
List Price: $16.98
Buy New: $11.52
You Save: $5.46 (32%)
Buy New/Used from $11.52
Avg. Customer Rating:  (19 reviews)
Sales Rank: 62992
Media: Audio CD
Discs: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.2
Dimensions (in): 5.6 x 5 x 0.5
MPN: 79320
UPC: 075597932027
EAN: 0075597932027
ASIN: B000005J27
Release Date: September 28, 1993
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
 Dangerously relaxing music November 19, 2005
3 out of 6 found this review helpful
If you're looking for a nice, catchy tune, this is probably not for you.
The best way to listen to this is as a kind of sound sculpture, designed to get you very very very relaxed indeed.
Recently on holiday, lying on the beach, I had this playing on my i-pod and, on more than one occasion, became aware of not breathing - so frighteningly relaxed had I become. Not an altogether pleasant experience, but a pretty powerful indication of the music's effectiveness.
On the face of it, nothing much happens in this piece, nor is there is any discernible beginning or end. The basic pattern of sustained, broken piano chord echoed by strings basically stays the same, although, on the way, individual notes chime in from time to time and sounds and emphases shift almost indiscernibly. The conversation between piano and stings strongly resembles very relaxed, very slow breathing - hence the sensation of catching yourself apparently not doing the same!
On another level, this is a deeply meditative piece - a profound contemplation on the sensuality of sound. Its mesmeric repetitiveness effectively hypnotises the listener into a heightened sense of awareness for the everyday, largely blocked out noises that fill our ears. Indeed every incidental sound - the barking of a dog, traffic horns, a police siren roaring past - are engulfed in and become part of the music itself - and, in this way, the mundane becomes significant and beautiful.
Again, this really is not for everyone, but as a piece of sound sculpture it is truly a work of art.
Prismatic and Hauntingly Beautiful June 30, 2005
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
This was my introduction to Feldman. I had the advantage of coming from an art background where the painter Mark Rothko had introduced me to the beauty and value of minimalism. This work appealed to me right away. This work embodies the hush of distant and twinkling notes, like a clear night sky.
Feldman was channelling the music of the spheres and helping to shape our contemporary musical aesthetics. His compositional genius is breaking music into its constituent pieces. Each note is a functional component in a divine machine of experiential timelessness. I find his work ecstatic. Feldman managed to disrobe classical composition and his pieces give us the experience of the naked tones of individual orchestral instruments, in much the same way a prism makes a spectrum of white light. But Feldman's work is not simply conceptual and deconstructionist in nature. Feldman asks us to slow down and take notice of the felt presence of immediate experience, the one thing that binds us all. He gives us the opportunity to take in delicate sounds strewn across a broad stroke of time because it feels really good to do that. This work is one of the most important pieces of the last century and will be a salient piece for centuries to come. Feldman gently brings us to a quiet place inside ourselves and that can take real effort in our modern world.
 A modest dissent from the raves below.... February 13, 2005
34 out of 44 found this review helpful
...all of which are well deserved. This is an extremely well played piece. The individual phrases are beautiful but...
Try this thought experiment. Imagine you have never heard the "To be or not to be" speech from Hamlet. You know nothing of the train of its thought, the beauty of its English, its cultural resonance. Now imagine that you are hearing it performed by one of our greatest interpreters, an Olivier, a Burton or a Kline. Someone with a truely beautiful voice. Now imagine them intoning the speech softly speaking one word every 20 to 30 seconds or so but at irregular intervals. Could you follow the flow of the argument, could you hear the flow of the poetry? Would you want to? Sure, especially with repeated listenings, you could put it all together but would you enjoy the poetry as much as you would if it were spoken at a normal rate?
Now read the reviews below. They speak of the concentration, of the need to learn how to hear this piece. I understand that some music requires that and have been willing to do that work many times. Music is a demanding mistress.
But with this piece, I just don't hear it even after repeated listenings. For me, there is little payback. It is one thing to hold a phrase in your ears long enough to try to relate it to something heard twenty seconds ago, it is another to relate both of those to something heard fourty-three seconds earlier and so forth. For me this piece does nothing more than establish the limits of my ability to contextualize isolated phrases played at extended irregular intervals. Having established that I am ready to move on to something more meaningful for me.
As always, the above rant claims to be representative only of my own point of view. The other reviewers, many of whom I respect and read in order to learn from, feel very differently. I will say this. Feldman is a great composer, no argument there. So it might well be worth your time listening to this CD to discover your own reaction. But don't say no one warned you.
My First Feldman, but Not My Last March 7, 2004
35 out of 37 found this review helpful
When I asked earlier reviewers of recordings of music by Morton Feldman, weirdears and Edward Wright, where I should start with the music of Morton Feldman, I asked if I should go for the monumental - five hours long - Second String Quartet. They steered me away from that and suggested others. I chose this one. I had only a vague notion of what the music of Feldman would be like. I knew that it tended to go on for a long time, that it was 'minimalistic' (although it's not like other minimalists like Reich, Glass or Riley), and that it tended to be subdued. All those things are true, I found, with this piece, the Piano and String Quartet. What I didn't realize was that it would be hypnotic and, to borrow weirdears' assessment, 'addictive.'The first time through I found myself gritting my teeth wanting more to happen. And it never did. And I was impatient and frustrated. The second time through I simply let it play in the background as I did something else. The third time through, having determined that it was not 'awful' and probably really quite good if I'd let it be, I decided to really listen through its entire length and see what I could hear. That's when I came to understand that Feldman's music repays close listening. There are very subtle happenings--phase changes, harmonic changes, minuscule 'events,'--and I came to really admire the concentration of the musicians involved--in this recording pianist Aki Takahashi and the Kronos Quartet. And then I recalled reading somewhere that the Kronos Quartet has given up playing the Second Quartet--that five hour span--because, as I remember it, they said they'd gotten 'too old.' I can understand that. This is, for all its minimal dynamics and slow tempo, enormously difficult music to play because of the intense concentration involved. What of the music itself? I felt my pulse and breathing slowing down, my tension easing away and yet an inability to pull myself away from concentrating on it. In some ways it must be like meditation, except I found my mind active, not lulled. It became a puzzle whose solution I needed to find, even as I felt calmed by it. What I'm trying to say is that this is not like any music I've ever listened to before, and it took new 'ears' and 'mind' to take it in, but once I did I was repaid. The general layout is delicate arpeggios or single notes in the piano against slowing evolving mostly diatonic chords in the strings, never rising above a modest mezzo piano. Simple enough. But strangely evolving. And it goes by slowly enough that one has time to really think deeply about what is happening. I think there are two valid ways to hear this music. One is to let it pass over you, or through you, without your giving it much attention. But the more rewarding way is to HEAR what is happening. Thank you, weirdears and Edward Wright. And thank you, Aki Takahashi and Kronos. Scott Morrison
Late, great Feldman January 10, 2004
15 out of 17 found this review helpful
Morton Feldman's Piano and String Quartet is a work from his late period, completed in 1985, two years before the composer's death. This work shares three main characteristics with many of the other late works: highly subdued dynamics--typically piano or softer--an extended duration, in this case of around 75 minutes (which is short by comparison with the epic String Quartet II, For Philip Guston or For Christian Wolff) and a compositional technique inspired by the composer's love of Turkish rugs, whose patterns repeat constantly with slight alterations.Harmonically speaking, Piano and String Quartet is one of Feldman's most consonant works, with simple, diatonic harmonies and far less dissonance than other late works such as Coptic Light or For Samuel Beckett. The lack of harmonic complexity is matched by the constraints put on the musical material of the work, which is based on two very simple motifs: a brief arpeggiated rising figure in the piano and a set of rocking chords in the strings (Feldman often observed that the longer the work, the less material he needed, and this work is a case in point). The motifs gradually vary throughout the work, through simple processes such as omitting or reordering notes or collapsing the arpeggiation into chords, though they also reguarly return to their original form--or very close to it. In the closing bars, the strings fall silent and the piano arpeggiations are heard alone, before the music simply stops. Piano and String Quartet strikes me as one of the finest of Feldman's late works--I find its blending of repetition and change quite hypnotic, and the timbral contrast between piano and string quartet perfectly judged--and it is good to hear it played by Aki Takahashi and the Kronos Quartet, the performers it was written for. These musicians are outstanding in this repertoire (Takahashi was one of Feldman's favourite interpreters) and this recording can be seen as near-definitive. Nonetheless, this disc wouldn't strike me as an ideal introduction to Feldman unless one was coming to his music from a minimalist standpoint: listeners approaching Feldman from more mainstream repertoire would be advised to hear Rothko Chapel first. Feldman completists, however, will need this disc, though they will probably also want to hear the Ives Ensemble--another group of Feldman specialists--on Hat Hut in their slightly faster (just over 71 minutes as opposed to just over 79 on this disc) reading.
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