Self Portrait
Morton Feldman

Early and Unknown Piano Works

If you thought that with all the Morton Feldman CDs out on the market, you've already heard everything or at least have an idea as to what you haven't yet heard will sound like, guess again… Debora Petrina's new recital disc opens with a series of never-before-recorded very un-Feldman sounding early Feldman piano works, three of which predate his historic meeting with John Cage. A virtuoso show piece dating from Feldman's 17th year, the First Piano Sonata (1943)—there was never a second—is Feldman's earliest surviving composition. Dedicated to Béla Bartók and filled with grandiose full-handed chords whose single movement races by in under six minutes. "Preludio," from the following year, and "Self Portrait," from the next, continue along a similar compositional path and combine very pianistic melodies with mid-century American polytonality.

In stark contrast, the "Three Dances" from 1950, created soon after his first encounters with Cage, sounds totally like Cage's contemporaneous music: primitivistic repetitions, long pauses and all. The last movement even requires the pianist to strike a drum and a glass with the right hand while the left hand continually repeats the exact same chord. The bizarre "For Cynthia" which Feldman wrote for his first wife at some unknown point in the 1950s lasts a mere 37 seconds. Given its almost nursery-school evoking polytonality, it would a prime contender for a "you'll never guess who wrote this in a million years" encore piece.

The disc concludes with some very distinctive Feldman, his 1966 Two Pieces for Three Pianos, here performed alone by Ms. Petrina with the help of overdubbing by recording engineer Glenn Freeman. Characteristic of much mid-period Feldman, the Two Pieces play off the interplay between imprecisely notated rhythms and very precisely notated ones, creating a sonic blur which the program notes remind us are reminiscent of the blurriness in Mark Rothko's contemporaneous paintings which Feldman so admired. Shockingly, despite the 134 CDs released thus far containing Morton Feldman's music, this is also a first recording. One possible explanation for its previous absence from recording catalogs, however, might be the level of difficulty of each of the individual piano parts, which without overdubbing, might actually require more than three pianists. According to the excellent discography on the definitive Feldman Web site maintained by Chris Villars, there are still another 18 Feldman works yet to be recorded. So who knows what other surprises still await us!

—FJO

First Piano Sonata (5:51)
Preludio (2:28)
Self Portrait (3:46)

Three Dances
I (1:53)
II (2:17)
III (2:46)

For Cynthia (0:41)

Two Pieces for Three Pianos
I (19:11)
II (15:16)