Morton Feldman/Erik Satie/John Cage, Rothko Chapel - album review

Download: Rothko Chapel; Gnossienne No. 1; Five; In A Landscape; Four2

 

Andy Gill
Friday 13 November 2015 13:03 GMT
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Morton Feldman/Erik Satie/John Cage Rothko Chapel
Morton Feldman/Erik Satie/John Cage Rothko Chapel

Commissioned to write the music for the Houston chapel containing works by his friend Mark Rothko, Morton Feldman created one of the cornerstone works of his oeuvre, a piece whose wordless choral keenings and tints of tuned percussion seem to echo the way the paintings’ colour-fields blur space and time, with only Kim Kashkashian’s elegantly ascetic viola offering a resolution of sorts with an unexpected modal melody.

This new recording by the Houston Chamber Choir with Kashkashian, pianist Sarah Rothenberg and percussionist Steven Schick rivals the California EAR Unit version in its sensitivity, and is sympathetically programmed alongside similarly contemplative pieces by John Cage and Erik Satie.

Rothenberg’s renditions of Satie’s familiar “Gnossiennes” are accompanied by his less well-known “Ogive Nos. 1 & 2” and Cage’s dreamlike “In A Landscape”.

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