Despite distractions, Tepfer and Trio Fadolin find the Feldman groove

Thu Oct 10, 2024 at 11:57 am
Morton Feldman’s Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello. was performed by Dan Tepfer and Trio Fadolin Wednesday night at the New York Studio School.

The New York Studio School, an important training center for drawing, painting, and sculpting, is marking its 60th anniversary. This has been an extended celebration, as the school was founded in 1963, and one that has included one of the finest 20th century composers, Morton Feldman.

Feldman was dean of the NYSS from 1969-1971, a prominent sign of a remarkable time—now gone—when there were intimate connections between avant-garde art and avant-garde art music, and when merit mattered more than academic credentials (the NYSS only started offering an MFA degree this century). In September of last year, NYSS began their celebration with a fine concert of Miranda Cuckson and Conor Hanick playing some of Feldman’s music for violin and piano, and this continued Wednesday night with an equally inspired performance of his Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello.

It didn’t start that way, though. This was Feldman’s final composition before his death in 1987 at age 61, and is one of his most beautiful works. The style is like that of his other late chamber works; quiet and unhurried (the duration is around 75 minutes), with discrete, repeated ideas that dissipate like ripples on a pond. There is no development of form but rather accumulation of impressions and experiences. As Feldman himself described it, music like this needs to have the time and stillness to breathe.

For the stillness, NYSS assistant director of exhibitions and public programs Kara Carmack asked the audience to make sure to silence their phones before the music began—so of course someone’s phone chimed in the suspended silence of the moment just before the playing started. 

Worse though was the pressure the musicians—jazz and classical pianist Dan Tepfer and Trio Fadolin (violinist Sabina Torosjan, Ljova playing his 6-string “fadolin” viola, cellist Valeriya Sholokhova)—put into the playing. There was intensity and concentration, but it came out in an urgency that is misplaced in Feldman. Though the playing was slow enough, it also felt rushed, without the care and focus on shaping and placing sounds in between the silent spaces, the breaths too shallow.

At about the eight-minute mark, that energy started to mellow, and the musicians hit the right balance, sculpting the chords and tiny phrases in the NYSS clay room with gentle projection. 

But then there was a technical problem: the group was reading the music on iPads—Ljova had done the yeoman’s work of digitally typesetting Feldman’s manuscript—synced together, with Sholokhova turning the pages for all via her foot pedal. But the bluetooth connection failed, possibly caused by interference from the audience’s mobile phones, and the score froze. The musicians stopped, reset everything, asked people to put their phones on airplane mode, and started again from the top. 

And now, the playing was quite fine. The mood and style the musicians had found before the pause continued, this time even deeper and more natural. There was a sensitivity to the placement of sounds in space, how they began and finished, that this music needs.

The effect on the listener developed with such subtlety that when it became pronounced, it was simple to accept even as it might have been radical: that this music was clearly on a straight—albeit extended—line from the likes of Schumann. In some ways, Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello is Feldman’s most conventional composition, with small but specific phrases passed back and forth between the strings and piano, passages that flirt at monophony, and a few luminous major chords that seem to stand like statues at a central point in the work.

The musicians played this like they heard that connection, the internal communication in the score along with getting the rhythms and dynamics right. And they had Feldman’s unique tone color, a sound that is gentle and uncanny, both pleasurable and disorienting, like a warm cotton ball that somehow has sharp edges. That meant careful, precise dynamics from each player, and superb intonation from the strings. With all that, Feldman was just about a corporeal presence amid the workbenches and shelves packed with sculptures.


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