United Kingdom Morton Feldman, Unsettled Memory: Apartment House, Juliet Fraser (soprano), Eliza McCarthy (piano). LSO St Luke’s, London, 19.9.2026. (CC)
Morton Feldman – Projection 2 (1951); Three Voices (1982); Triadic Memories (1981)
This was a celebration of the centenary of maverick composer Morton Feldman (1926-87). The title, Unsettled Memory, refers to the composer’s way of subtly altering repetitions of material as well as the transitory, ungraspable nature of the music.
It was good to see such a strong audience at LSO St Luke’s for the 5pm start (9.20pm finish!) – and although there was some thinning towards the end, this was surely an acknowledgement of the enthusiasm that remains for challenging music of this ilk.
The afternoon-and-evening began with Projection 2, and a reminder of the openness of graphic scores when it comes to duration: most recorded performances of Projection 2 last about five minutes; the longest I know is the Turfan Ensemble’s Mode recording, at 5’55” and this account by Apartment House was about that.
Non-vibrato from the strings (cellist Anton Lukoszevieze and violinist Gordon MacKay) was absolutely in keeping with the piece’s aesthetic, the sounds almost viol-like. A mute for the trumpet (Rebecca Toal) adds to the music’s objectivist slant when it comes to timbre. But this is far from objective when it comes to emotion: Feldman’s sounds held within an envelope of silence take on huge significance. Every extraneous sound matters, too: in a Cageian way, audience and usher sounds (latecomer’s footsteps, the usher’s keys all a-jangle) become part of the experience, too.
One question that arises is the challenges to the instruments on a technical level: an accurate low attack and sustain on trumpet is a major challenge, and Toal delivered consistent excellence. Feldman’s music seems to speak best when delivered with a sort of distanced lyricism: an appreciation of the sound of a note itself out of the surrounding silence, and that awareness was everywhere present.
This is one of five Projections, all written between late 1950 and early 1951, placing them very firmly at the beginning of Feldman’s output. The influence of Varèse on the musical side and Abstract artists Mark Rothko and Philip Guston more generally played a part in their genesis. Projection II follows on from a solo cello work, Projections I. Projections II dates from very early in 1951 – the intent is very much a rhetoric-free environment. Composed onto graph paper, its indeterminacy when extended to heavenly lengths (as here) seems to change the flow of time by seemingly randomly placed sound-points. Colour comes from modes of attack and register, not least the piano’s activation of its own harmonics (Kerry Yong, here). All Feldman gives is the general pitch of the notes, along with their relative lengths and dynamics, the rest is free.
The performance by Apartment House was a fine one; it was only in retrospect that, when the remaining two pieces were experienced, one felt it was not quite of the same exalted order.
Short intervals separated the three pieces. Three Voices of 1982 was written for Philip Guston and Frank O’Hara and is dedicated to the avant-garde singer and composer Joan La Barbara, who commissioned and premiered the work. It was performed here as per Feldman’s original intention: one singer, and two recorded parts (recorded by the same singer) through two speakers. It was wonderful to experience the artistry of soprano Juliet Fraser again: in 2017 she sang Rebecca Saunders’ Skin at the Siemens Award’s concert (review here), and it was utterly unforgettable. So was this: a haunting 53 minutes of utter beauty. Words are sparse as the piece is mainly non-verbal, except for two lines from Frank O’Hara’s poem, Wind, itself dedicated to Feldman (Three Voices is an in memoriam for NYC poet O’Hara). The loudspeakers, in this context, represent tombstones (‘tombstoney’ was the word Feldman used).
There are ten sections: Opening; Legato; Slow Waltz; First Words; Whisper; Chords; A non-accented legato; Snow Falls; Legato; Slow Waltz and ending. Fraser gave a delicious sense of eternity at the opening’s repetitions and echoes: it is interesting contrast that with the dedicatee, Joan La Barbara’s rather more urgent recorded account.
It was with Fraser’s performance that the Feldman anniversary evening entered a new sphere. The opportunity to hear the music spatialised like this – one voice per speaker – in low lighting with an audience stunned into silence was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. There is an astonishing purity to Fraser’s voice – much like the non-vibrato of the strings earlier, but here also hearkening back, perhaps, to earlier musics such as Hildegard of Bingen. Time was altered again, but differently, the music now hypnotising, but a sort of Ericksonian hypnotism in that the altered states were achieved not just by repetition, but by altered repetition, an aspect of ‘unsettled memory’ (the parallel being how Milton Erickson would create a scenario in which the brain interpreted deliberately ungrammatical sentences as perfectly cogent statements – but it was the conscious/subconscious dissonance that created the patient/client’s altered state).
When the words come, they sure do count: the words ‘snow falls’ explaining the ‘drooping’ nature of much of the gestures prior. Dissonances, initially semitonal, between the three voices spoke universes, not just words: and there is something extremely touching about a perfectly-tuned dissonance.
The lines used, specifically, are: ‘Who’d have thought / that snow falls,’ and, later, ‘snow whirled / nothing ever fell’
Like snow itself, Feldman’s gestures seem to dissolve, again and again, into silence. This performance will haunt my dreams, in the nicest of ways. The only thing that could have improved this performance is if they left the back window of St Luke’s open to view, and it started snowing.
There is ‘containment’ here, too – a word used twice in the poem to represent not just snow, but snow globes; while the words ‘imprisoned in crystal’ also appear in the poem. That darker aspect is certainly clearer in La Barbara’s performance, but Fraser offers an alternative of preternatural beauty.
Finally, the 90-minute piano piece Triadic Memories of 1981 (six years before his death). dedicated to two pianists who were to be significant interpreters: Aki Takahashi and Roger Woodward. Feldman’s own description of it was as ‘the biggest butterfly in captivity’. The piece is influenced by the patterning of Turkish carpets, a preoccupation of Feldman’s (and quite a lucrative one). He has also talked about how the close yet irregular pattering idea works: ‘In this regularity (though there are slight gradations of tempo) there is a suggestion that what we hear is functional and directional, but we soon realise that this is an illusion: a bit like walking the streets of Berlin – where all the buildings look alike, even if they’re not.’
This was Feldman performance on piano as I have never heard it: a purity of attack, ‘clean’ playing that could only be linked to Bach on the piano, but within this Modernist frame. While the voices of the preceding piece sustain by their very nature, the piano sustains via resonance, and here those very resonances took on a life of their own.
Interestingly, both Fraser and McCarthy remained very still in performance; emotive performance was definitely not on either’s agenda. The music spoke for itself, resulting in a Triadic Memories of crystalline beauty. And what was surprising, was that some passages almost danced, context perhaps suggesting the notes were snow in the wind.
Micro-detail was astonishing: the weighing of each and every chord and note was almost superhumanly consistent (I think only one bass note did not sound, but I may be wrong). McCarthy used different tone quality for different voices within chord progressions superbly; this was nuanced playing of a stratospheric order.
Once again, time shape-shifted. The performance lasted one hour 25 minutes (performance durations of Triadic Memories vary between 60 and 90 minutes generally), but I wished it could last much longer. McCarthy presented a different sort of virtuosity, one of complete control of attack, of timbre, of space, of Feldman’s definition of ‘rhythm’ (Feldman’s ‘rhythm’ above the most immediate level seems to exist in a sort of super-temporality); in these terms, this was the performance of a super-virtuoso.
There should be much more Feldman in London, too. It was so satisfying to see such a healthily-sized audience. Surely this should tell concert promoters and organisers this is a rich vein to be mined?
Meanwhile, as we celebrate Feldman, we celebrate, too, these performances.
Colin Clarke