Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello marks the culmination of Morton Feldman’s late chamber writing, recorded at Henry Wood Hall in London in 2017 by a quartet comprised of Mark Knoop (piano), Aisha Orazbayeva (violin), Bridget Carey (viola), and Anton Lukoszevieze (cello). The composition, premiered in 1987, unspools over seventy-five minutes as an unhurried expanse - a landscape where micro-variations bring fragile changes within near-stasis, and the weight of each chord, sustain, and silence is palpable.
Strings and piano operate as a single, breathing entity; piano arpeggios and string chords interweave, sometimes echoing, sometimes dissolving into tranquil haze. Feldman's minimal means produce maximal effect: through subtle shifts in timbre, bow pressure, and overlapping voicings, the piece draws attention to the passing of musical memory - the sense that what was just heard is always receding, replaced by something newly fragile. The recording’s concentrated pace and clarity, as captured by Simon Reynell, reward patient listening, revealing new detail and beauty upon each encounter.
Feldman’s passion for the unresolved and the almost-disappearing saturate the work. The performers bring rare discipline and poise- notes inhaled and exhaled as a single body, structures arising and fading like weather. The album’s cardboard gatefold packaging and crystalline engineering underscore the music’s elemental, tactile depth. Piano, Violin, Viola, Cellostands as a major contribution to Feldman’s discography and Another Timbre’s catalogue - an invitation to experience chamber music stretched to the edge of audibility, where stillness and slow change take on lyric, generative form.
