Morton Feldman: For Samuel Beckett

Album review

Morton Feldman's swan song is For Samuel Beckett, scored in 1987 for a non-standard chamber orchestra of 23 players and performed on this Kairos disc by Klangforum Wien under the direction of Sylvain Cambreling. The disc contains only one track, For Samuel Beckett, and runs 54 and a half minutes. Unlike some late Feldman works, which are justly lauded for their sweetness of sound, long durations, and unending sense of solitudinarian calm, For Samuel Beckett has a mysterious and somewhat menacing character. Subdivided instrumental groups exchange pitches belonging to a large, dissonant cluster chord. The basic notes in use do not vary, but the order in which they come in, and the combinations resulting thereof, does. As Marcel Duchamp once said, "Repetition is change," and this is a terrific example of minimalism in music that is not "minimalistic" in style, at least not in the usual sense of the term.
For Samuel Beckett seems to hearken back for inspiration to Beckett works such as Ping and Imagination Dead Imagine, mid-'60s texts running only four to five pages but stated in an English so dense that either text could easily take a couple of days to read to fully grasp -- "a place where imagination itself is dead," as one long-forgotten critic put it. Kairos' For Samuel Beckett is beautifully recorded and would make a terrific, low-volume companion for a long, sleepless night spent with a book. Just don't read the liner notes to this disc; even if they were translated well into English (and they are not so), these notes by Hans-Peter Jahn would be ridiculous. For example, in a section suggesting that Beckett is not so original after all, as Feldman is stylistically so much like him, Jahn writes, "The evidence is well known, stagnant almost like a pond, laughing and stinking." Pee-yew!
Cambreling keeps the ensemble under control, and the music never gets loud. The care Cambreling exercises in leading the ensemble results in a performance that truly brings out the most naturalistic and evocative elements within Feldman's score, and he manages to keep the music going for as long as it's likely to last. This still leaves plenty of empty space at the end of the disc. Although there is something to be said about keeping the integrity of For Samuel Beckett intact by presenting it as the only work, and that it is likely that many listeners will put this on in auto-repeat mode until they are tired of it, would it have hurt to have included another, shorter Feldman piece? As a work, For Samuel Beckett serves as a beautiful, extended postscript to a career cut too short. As a recording, Kairos' For Samuel Beckett is probably the best way to go for this seminal work, but couldn't it have been cut a little longer?

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