Mode Records marks the centenary of Morton Feldman's birth with a rare chance to hear the composer play his own music. The fifteenth volume of the label's Feldman Edition documents a single evening in Cologne in 1978, recorded by Deutschlandfunk, when Feldman shared the stage with his two most trusted interpreters, the flutist Eberhard Blum and the percussionist Jan Williams.

The concert was part of the Beginner Studio, the series that the composer Walter Zimmermann ran from 1977 to 1984 in a loft in Cologne. Zimmermann was one of Feldman's earliest champions in Europe, and it was he who invited the trio to present the programme heard here.

At its centre is Why Patterns?, written in the year of the concert and very likely captured here in its earliest recording. Feldman wrote it as an uncoordinated score: the three players start together, then each proceeds independently through repetitions and permutations of pattern material, intervallic and durational, until they meet again at the end. The piece grew out of his fascination with Persian rugs and their small, deliberate irregularities, and the result is glacial and free-floating, a music that draws attention to the shape of events rather than their harmonic function. Over thirty-two minutes the flute, piano and percussion drift in and out of phase, close enough to touch and never quite aligned.

Around it, Feldman sits alone at the piano for two short pieces from 1952, Extensions 3 and Intermission 5, written in the years when he was finding his voice alongside John Cage. Williams plays The King of Denmark (1964), the solo percussion work in which the sticks are put down and the instruments are sounded with fingers and hands, at the very threshold of hearing.

Released on CD as Feldman Edition 15, with liner notes by Walter Zimmermann and Morton Feldman.