A concert of works by Morton Feldman performed at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. Conductor: Yuval Zorn

 

Morton Feldman (Feldman Edition 10)

The Lower Gallery of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art was the venue on June 25th 2024 for the final concert of a marathon held under the auspices of Hateiva. (Hateiva, an intimate performance hall in Jaffa, Israel, is a centre for experimentation in music, for concerts of contemporary- and other classical music, electronic sound art events, video exhibitions and screenings, multidisciplinary events and lectures on new music.) The evening's program consisted of two works of New York composer Morton Feldman (1926-1097), one of the most significant figures in the music of the second half of the 20th century.

 

 

The concert opened with "The King of Denmark" (1965) a short solo-percussion piece performed by multi-disciplinary musician Oded Geizhals. A study in instrumental colour, the score, notated graphically, consists of a three-part grid indicating high-, medium- and low pitches. It abounds in numbers, letters and symbols representing instruments and articulations. The actual choice of instruments, however, is left almost entirely to the performer and there is no use of sticks or mallets. The sounds are produced only by the performer’s hands or arms. Might one, therefore, consider this an anti-percussion piece?  A tempo runs throughout, but bearing no rhythmic coherence. From the work's first diaphanous, scarcely-audible sounds, Geizhals' gracile and unwavering delivery draws the audience into the intimate canvas of "The King of Denmark", as mostly-single gestures seem to float out, detached and weightless, the large instruments and small finding uncanny uniformity of volume. Adding to the sound world created by the artist's subtle handling of the many instruments surrounding him on three sides was the intriguing visual aspect of the making of music.

 

 

Morton Feldman’s "Rothko Chapel" (1971), a tribute to Mark Rothko, was named for the Houston, Texas multi-faith chapel, a place for meditation and inter-religious conferences. Built to house fourteen of Rothko's large paintings, the work had its première in the chapel in 1972, a year after its opening. Abstract Expressionist painter Mark Rothko (born Markus Rothkowitz in Dvinsk, Russian Empire), was a friend of the composer. Feldman had a deep understanding and appreciation of Rothko’s paintings. At the Tel Aviv concert, Feldman’s sonic meditation existing within a sparse soundscape, was performed by Imri Talgam (celesta), Oded Geizhals (percussion), Yoni Gartner (viola), Einat Aronstein (soprano), Ina Magril (alto) and 20 singers making up the Moran Singers Ensemble (conductor: Tom Karni; music director: Naomi Faran). Yuval Zorn conducted the performance. Tel Aviv Museum's Lower Gallery is a tall, imposing, stark space, devoid of artworks, devoid of colour and of distraction. With the singers lined along both sides of the hall, the instrumentalists located at the front and Zoran conducting from the back, it was as if the performers had physiologically recreated the chapel and that we, the attenders, were seated within this human sonic shell. Feldman had said that his "choice of instruments (in terms of forces used, balance and timbre) was affected by the space of the chapel as well as the paintings" and that he had wanted the music "to permeate the whole octagonal-shaped room and not be heard from a certain distance.”  Approachable, more structurally straightforward and explicitly tonal than much of his oeuvre, the economy of this music echoes the simplicity of Rothko’s imagery. Here, time is stretched. Silences are as much a part of the musical experience as the sounds. Maestro Zorn drew all these elements and the performers into a meticulously amalgamated realisation of the score. With articulacy, the singers, humming and singing wordless syllables, sometimes together, at others, in small groupings, gave finely-controlled expression to the work's static, fragile timbres, these punctuated by the occasional lush, gossamery cluster. Geizhals and Talgam's playing endorsed the piece's carefully-paced haunting beauty and reverence. In small gestures, then in melodiousness wrought of easeful leaps and, later, in her dialogue with Yoni Gartner, Einat Aronstein's pure, resonant vocalization coincided with the work's meditative aspect. Gartner's playing, poised, measured, elegiac and reflective, was a moving reminder that, in this piece, Feldman's Jewishness is never far removed; the closing lamenting viola melodies, set against repeated four-note patterns in the vibraphone and celesta, including a lonely melody which Feldman wrote when he was a teenager, are clearly Hebraic in origin. An eloquent, profound and imposing performance.