John Tilbury's three consecutive days of recitals form the centrepiece of the CCA's short but imaginative contemporary music series in the Gallery. His afternoon recitals are devoted to the work of the iconocastic English experimentalist Cornelius Cardew; however, he began his sequence of more formal evening concerts with the first of two programmes of
the music of an American composer much admired by Cardew, Morton Feldman.
Each of the Feldman concerts features a single long work for solo piano. He plays For Bunita Marcus (1985) tonight, but opened with the slightly earlier Triadic Memories (1981). Both are around 90 minutes long, which is modest by comparison with the four and five-hour durations of some of the works of that period, and carry all the distinctive hallmarks of this so-called late period.
Feldman's music is something of an acquired taste, but once hooked, the rewards are great.
Triadic Memories requires considerable concentration on the part of both the performer - his music is often played badly because it is is mistakenly thought to be simple - and the listener, a task made more difficult here by the continuous crashing of plates from the CCA's adjacent kitchen.
John Tilbury overcame such distractions in assured style, and dealt sensitively w ith the demands of a music which focuses on sound itself, and on scale and duration rather than any conventional notions of form.
It is never virtuosic in the
usual sense, but is often daringly slow and sparse, built on skeletal or non-existent harmony, subtle variations of soft dynamics, and intricate gradations of tempo, metre, and rhythmic accentuation, while space and silence are an integral part of the musical fabric.
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