Album: Morton Feldman, Trio (Mode)

Written in the early Eighties, Trio was one of Feldman's first long-form pieces employing a conventional chamber palette of violin, cello and piano. It involves neither epic musical narrative nor the tedium of process music, its 105 minutes instead built from his usual small-scale blocks of sound.

This latest interpretation by Aki Takahashi, Rohan de Saram and Marc Sabat is full of Feldman's usual tropes – the constantly shifting meter, the favouring of decay over attack, the "crippled symmetry" of repetition (in some cases, the same few notes played more than 50 times in succession, with subtle variations of touch and timing) without the imposition of minimalist pulse, and the evaporation of timbres at their upper extremes – resulting in a typically focused, absorbing and meditative experience unlike any other.

Download this Trio