It’s taken a while, but it’s worth the wait: the Complete Music for Cello & Piano by Morton Feldman, performed by my lovely wife Marilyn Nonken (piano) and the estimable Stephen Marotto (cello), is now out and available for purchase from Mode Records. The centerpiece of the 2-CD set is Feldman’s hypnotic 1981 “Patterns in a Chromatic Field,” but the works range in time from 1946 through 1981, permitting the listener to chart Feldman’s development over nearly thirty-five years of his musical activity. Recorded at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) in Troy, NY, in 2018, it’s beautifully recorded and mastered by producers Jeffrey Means and Brian Brandt and engineers Jeff Svatek and Todd Vos. Nobody who’s interested in 20th-century American music will want to be without it.
The CD is available from Mode Records and a top-quality FLAC download of the album can be found at Bandcamp; it will be released through various streaming services next month.