Igor Levit makes a (successful) spectacle of Morton Feldman in The Shed's Sonic Sphere

Igor Levit’s concert in a suspended sphere in the arts venue The Shed, on Manhattan’s west side, may well have been the first performance of Morton Feldman that came with a warning that “this program uses haze, flashing lights, and strobe effects”. The recital was performed within a space at once intimate and with the surreal remove of science fiction: a 65-foot diameter orb modeled after Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Kugelauditorium, built for the 1970 World Expo in Osaka. 

The 100 speakers affixed to the Sonic Sphere dome may have been put to greater use in some of the prerecorded electronic music presentations in the orb than the gentle phrases of Feldman’s final work for solo piano. Palais de Mari is a gentle 20 minutes or so, complemented for this performance with lighting in slow currents of pink, yellow and orange, sometimes dissolving to blue, and subtle amplification that let the sounds move slowly around the sphere. Was there a point to the display? Perhaps not. But if we were able to ask Stockhausen about setting Feldman in his structure, we might well get a response about the expansion of experience and consciousness. With lighting design by visual artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, Levit made Feldman into something otherworldly – or perhaps made the world into something Feldmanesque.

The concert began with a fluid reading of a section of Bach’s cantata Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ, BWV177. The lights emerged in points, refracted by the scrim stretched across the inside of the sphere, in warm tones. Levit paused while the space flickered to near darkness and at some length entered into Feldman’s sound world. White lights lit the dome, seeming to cascade gently down the sides, the fragmented piano phrases barely clinging to the air. White turned to pink with the first delicate dissonance. 

Feldman actually slows the listener’s metabolism, or at least seems to (for some, admittedly, it may cause anxiety or annoyance). To have the visible world gently pulsate with him, as if we were inside a tree watching the circulation of sap, was something wonderful. It was a world where Feldman’s music fit in, rather than being a respite. Levit’s reading was painstakingly lovely. Feeling the force of such a performer’s focus, and the subconscious tension of trying to follow counts in the ever-shirting meters, is what keeps Feldman’s music from being ‘relaxing’. Within that frame, in a concert that last just over half an hour, Levit’s performance was beautiful, lyrical. He laid fairly heavy on the sustain pedal and in his thoughtful emphases gave poetic articulation to the phrases. 

Like the music, the lights seemed to do little – unless attention was directed toward them. A third option, rather than watching the colour fields or Levit’s hands, though, was to simply close the eyes and let the muted hues filter through the eyelids... but then, there was no Stockhausen. There was no structure in sound or steel, there was no piano, there was just Feldman’s floating phrases, suspended in time, inside this sphere, floating somewhere alongside the Hudson River.