By a curious coincidence, I saw Rothko Chapel performed the other night as well, here in New York. It was the fourth time for me (over a period of about thirty years), and as with all the other times it seemed a little underdramatized; it’s mid-period Feldman, not late Feldman, and has some genuinely dramatic moments (the viola swelling up to forte punctuated by tubular bells, for example). The original recording (on Odyssey, during Feldman’s lifetime) doesn’t hesitate to be a little more forceful; since then, influenced by the flatter affect of his late work, I suspect, performances have been more hesitant to raise their voices.
(By the way, the same metaphor has occurred to both of us: there is definitely something Entish about Feldman’s work that makes one think “hasty” when he does something different!)
What made the concert a necessity, though, was my first opportunity to see Gyorgy Kurtag’s (not going to try for the diacriticals) Messages of the Late R.V. Troussova in concert for the first time, another work of roughly the same vintage (written in the 70s, premiered in 1981) that has been a longtime favorite in recordings: a very different piece, a descendant of Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire (soprano, mixed chamber ensemble) but with a Hungarian accent and a very colorful 15-piece group.
Two pieces among the greatest of the 20th century, in my opinion.
P.S. Re Rothko, if you see a career retrospective of his work (as I have, twice), seeing him go from relatively representational to surrealist to three-color to monocolor, the final black paintings make a certain amount of sense in the career arc. Alone out of context they don’t work as well.
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Date: 2011-02-28 01:18 pm (UTC)(By the way, the same metaphor has occurred to both of us: there is definitely something Entish about Feldman’s work that makes one think “hasty” when he does something different!)
What made the concert a necessity, though, was my first opportunity to see Gyorgy Kurtag’s (not going to try for the diacriticals) Messages of the Late R.V. Troussova in concert for the first time, another work of roughly the same vintage (written in the 70s, premiered in 1981) that has been a longtime favorite in recordings: a very different piece, a descendant of Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire (soprano, mixed chamber ensemble) but with a Hungarian accent and a very colorful 15-piece group.
Two pieces among the greatest of the 20th century, in my opinion.
P.S. Re Rothko, if you see a career retrospective of his work (as I have, twice), seeing him go from relatively representational to surrealist to three-color to monocolor, the final black paintings make a certain amount of sense in the career arc. Alone out of context they don’t work as well.
Don Keller