Erik Satie, John Cage, Morton Feldman, Kim Kashkashian, Sarah Rothenberg, Steven Schick, Houston Chamber Choir, Robert Simpson

This album is built around Morton Feldman's Rothko Chapel (1971), written for the multi-faith chapel in Houston that houses fourteen site-specific canvases by Mark Rothko. Around it, pianist Sarah Rothenberg has placed music by the two composers who shaped Feldman's freedom: John Cage and, behind Cage, Erik Satie. Feldman said his music lay "between categories, between time and space, between painting and music", and called the score his "canvas". The programme follows those links from painting to sound and from one composer to the next.

Violist Kim Kashkashian leads the Feldman, with Rothenberg on celesta, Steven Schick on percussion and the Houston Chamber Choir under its artistic director Robert Simpson. The Cage and Satie pieces were recorded in May 2012 at Rice University in Houston. Rothko Chapel followed in February 2013 at the Brown Foundation Performing Arts Theater of the Asia Society Texas Center. Judith Sherman produced and engineered the sessions, and Rothenberg, who conceived the programme, wrote the liner notes.

In Rothko Chapel the viola moves across soft, still planes of choral sound, celesta and percussion, until the viola closes the piece with a "quasi-Hebraic" melody that Feldman had written at fifteen. Rothenberg plays three of Satie's Gnossiennes and the two early Ogives, and Cage's In a Landscape, a quiet piano piece of the late 1940s that owes much to Satie. The choir sings three late Cage works, ear for EAR (Antiphonies) from 1983, Five from 1988 and Four² from 1990. In Five the voices enter and leave in slowly overlapping lines.

Reviewing the disc for MusicWeb International in 2016, Dominy Clements called it "a very fine performance" of the Feldman and wrote that Kashkashian's "rich viola tones are a joy". He also praised Rothenberg's Satie for its touch and pacing. His one reservation was the dry acoustic of the theatre, which he felt suited the music less than a more resonant space would have. Cage himself rejected what he called an "ABC model of 'influence'", yet kept a lifelong fondness for Satie, and the sequencing lets the three composers answer one another.

CD edition of ECM New Series 2378, released on 2 October 2015, in a slipcase with Rothko's works reproduced in the booklet.