Album review: Sabine Liebner, Morton Feldman: Early Piano Pieces (Wergo)

 

Andy Gill
Saturday 08 December 2012 01:00 GMT
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This engrossing 2CD selection offers a fascinating account of Morton Feldman's vacillating progress between various forms of indeterminacy and structure, taking us from the piano pieces scored on graph paper in the early 1950s, to the more conventionally notated – though no less abstract – works of the 70s.

They all embody Feldman's fascination with sound as a pure event, free of the usual imperatives of pitch, metre, melody and narrative that anchor western classical form. Sabine Laubner, who recently tackled Cage's Etudes Australes over four CDs, is scrupulously attentive to each piece's peculiarities, and one looks forward to the album of Feldman's later, longer piano works like "Palais De Mari" and "Triadic Memories".

Download: Piano; Intermissions; Piano Piece (To Philip Guston)

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