OgreOgress productions continues its unparalleled work of releasing hitherto unreleased material by some of the most interesting composers of the modern era, as is evident by the transparent lucidity of Christina Fong’s and The Rangzen Quartet’s recording of Morton Feldman’s long stroke laconism of Violin & String Quartet; one of Feldman’s last pieces, dating from 1985, at a time when Feldman’s music condensed on your listening awareness like humidity on a mirror left out in a fall garden. This music creeps upon you like dusk or dawn, however you’re inclined, or if you’ve experienced the northern lands, like the semitransparent veils of mist hovering just above the lush meadows at 3 AM, as the sun also rises…

Glenn Freeman of OgreOgress productions:

For practical reasons the work has been cut in two exact halves, allowing for 59 minutes on each CD, as, of course, there is no natural division in the work, which appears gradually out of silence and recedes gradually back into silence, from whence all sounds are born.

As is the case with many of Feldman’s works, and indeed especially with this one, the act of playing the music is not one of beginning, realizing and ending, but sort of a tapping into the music, as if the music was always there, but heard only through the gentleness of the musicians as they tap into it and let it resound into the hearing world through their instruments. This is a radical way of approaching Feldman’s art, but probably the most accurate, musically as well as philosophically. Thereby the musicians also become mediums for the music, rather than interpreters, letting go and letting the good medicine of timbres and timeless time flow towards the listeners in an everlasting gesture of generosity of universal good forces.

It appears these musicians have approached the music with open minds and spirits, allowing for the score to touch and transform their beings, attuning them into a sublime harmony with vibrating sound, because I have seldom (or ever) experienced such a timbral bliss in music as here, where there is rest and refreshment for tired contemporaries.

Feldman is in essence an equal to spirits like Hildegard von Bingen, St Thomas Of Aquino and other mystics, and why not to Arvo Pärt, the sage from Tallinn and Berlin, who reaches the same hovering bliss of detached awareness in Passio Domini Nostri Jesu Christi Secundum Joannem; Pärt’s Gospel of John. I’ve never heard anybody make this Feldman – Pärt connection, but all obvious differences taken into account, there is still an essence left in the listener’s mind after listening that is almost identical in both cases; a discovery which first surprised me when it dawned on me.

There is something truly asklepiadic (healing) to Feldman’s music, in a climate of the soul that could be likened to halkyonic days of pale light across September sea horizons of Scandinavia.