Feldman - Atlantis - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Samuel Blaser Quartet - Boundless [COMPACT DISCS] Spain - Import date 10/05/2011

The New York violin virtuoso Mark Feldman presents a new solo album, a portrait of the artist now, some twenty-six years after his first solo album. Sounding Point contains six of his own compositions as well as one piece each by Sylvie Courvoisier and Ornette Coleman. Coleman's 1987 Peace Warriors is one of three pieces in which Feldman skillfully employs overdubs. The American jazz critic Kevin Whitehead writes in the liner notes InchIn my 30+ years following violinist Mark Feldman, no record I know shows him off better than Sounding Point. He's made much great music in groups, but solo play gives him maximum elbow room, fully exposing the richness of his sound, his distinct personal voice, and his sensitivity to sonic texture and pacing, all at the service of musical storytelling. Take for example the shortest piece here, the improvised InchRebound.Inch He starts with a simple gesture, the bow's horsehairs bouncing lightly on the strings, a gesture he periodically returns to (and ends with), between scenic flights high notes and trills, bracing close-interval wailing on adjacent strings, a burst of percussive pizzicato, falling glissandi, whispered notes barely bowed... Fancy stuff. Yet those expansions and contractions, and the contrasting dynamics, sound natural as breathing.Inch

Morton Feldman's Patterns in a Chromatic Field is a major composition, not only in modern American music but in 20th-century music per se. The composer plays with the musical memory of his recipients and thus creates timeless spheres In minimally varying patterns, the listener experiences a trance-like avant-garde event in which past, present and future cancel each other out. Patterns in a Chromatic Field is based on the principle of differentiation and repetition. The composition functions like a still life, using the color variations of Middle Eastern rugs as a basis Even a pattern that appears to repeat itself exactly is actually slightly different in it's iterations because of slight changes in hue. In his piece for piano and violoncello, Morton Feldman now creates a large-scale auditive pattern whose sound aesthetics from the layers of notes is no less than a transformative and meditative experience of music. With Antonis Anissegos on the piano and Mathis Mayr, this recording unites two performers who not only are excellent instrumental players but also feel at home in electronic music - a fact that is of benefit to their version of Morton Feldman's minimalist soaring tonal architecture. Anissegos and Mayr create a detailed and intimate sound quality which can be regarded as referential in it's antithesis of the 'dramatic'.