Composer: Feldman, Morton (1926-1987)

With Morton Feldman's Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello, the Cikada ensemble embarked on a unsettlingly calming exploration of life itself.

Pianist Steven Osborne explored stillness in music in an intense and beautifully-controlled performance of works by American composers Morton Feldman and George Crumb.

After four and a half hours of glacial, repetitive, soporifically quiet music... the crowd goes wild! This was the scene at Issue Project Room on Sunday evening as three members from the Either/Or Ensemble concluded Morton Feldman’s monumental trio For Philip Guston.

Marino Formenti only briefly introduced his eclectic whirlwind recital, “Liszt Inspections”, before calling out “Good luck!” and diving into one of the most attention-grabbing sequences of music that I’ve ever witnessed.

“Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it. Do something else to it”. These are Morton Feldman’s own words on his Patterns in a Chromatic Field. And they are a concise and accurate description of what occurs during the piece. Patterns... is one of Feldman’s later works, composed in 1981.