Aisha Orazbayeva, Mark Knoop MORTON FELDMAN For John Cage

Morton Feldman and John Cage met at a New York performance of Webern’s aphoristic Symphony in 1950, the pair’s friendship enduring until Feldman's death in 1987. Some of Feldman's late chamber works are inordinately long. For John Cage, written in 1979, lasts 75 minutes in this performance. Trying to describe exactly why and how this music ‘works’ is near-impossible. Describing it as a formally diffuse extended duet between violin and piano, the pair often on the edge of audibility, will send some folk running for the hills. Repeated hearings bring the work’s three-part structure into sharper focus, the transformations and allusions seemingly more recognisable each time.

What's magical about so much of Feldman's music is how he can make the most uncompromising dissonance sound warm and consoling. This slow-paced piece doesn't contain hummable tunes, but it's intensely beautiful at times, Mark Knoop’s, soft, bell-like piano chords sharing the space with Aisha Orazbeyava’s violin. Near the close, the violin’s double stopping almost suggests the presence of a third player. “I tried to bring into my music just very few essential things that I need,” said Feldman, and after having overdosed on Rued Langgaard (see below), this disc proved to be a perfect musical decluttering. Nicely engineered, it’s one of several new releases on the label All That Dust, each one neatly presented and well annotated.