Two Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival performances by The Smith Quartet and John Tilbury have recently been released by Matchless Recordings. Music For Piano and Strings by Morton Feldman captures the string ensemble and the pianist at hcmf// 2006, interpreting Feldman’s 1985 Piano and String Quartet, whilst Tilbury and the quartet’s violinist Darragh Morgan team up for the 1982 violin and piano piece, For John Cage.

Formed in 1990, The Smith Quartet have an extensive repertoire of new music and have previously released recordings of works by Steve Reich and a specially written version of Gavin Bryars’ Sinking of the Titanic. For the hcmf// performance, they used looser, Baroque-style bows to achieve the light touch required by Feldman’s music. John Tilbury, meanwhile, is a former associate of Cornelius Cardew’s Scratch Orchestra, a longstanding member of AMM, and in 2000 released the CD box set Morton Feldman: All Piano.

In order to present each of the 90-minute works uninterrupted, the Matchless release comes as an audio DVD, playable on DVD players, computer DVD drives and other compatible equipment. To visit Matchless Recordings’ site and order Music For Piano and Strings by Morton Feldman directly, click here: http://www.matchlessrecordings.com/node/327

The release was praised by critic David Kettle in the current issue of specialist string magazine The Strad:

The Strad Magazine June 2010

Apart from a couple of menus and a few images, this is an audio-only DVD, the format chosen only in order to accommodate the two 90-minute works featured here without breaks. Both pieces occupy the same rarefied, subdued sound world of gentle dissonances and hypnotic repetitions that characterises Feldman's later pieces, and it's difficult to imagine more committed and engaging performances of them than these.

For John Cage (1982), for violin and piano, is the more ascetic of the two, its exposed lines and held tones often seeming perilously close to giving way to silence. Darragh Morgan, second violinist of the Smith Quartet, is hugely impressive, delivering a delicate performance alive to the subtleties and nuances of the music. He plays with seemingly effortless control yet brings an impressive spontaneity to his reading, and it's astonishing how he maintains such a refined sound and crisp articulation over 90 minutes of highly exposed material.

Piano and String Quartet (1985) is more substantial, providing a richer canvas and a wider range of sonorities. The Smith Quartet plays mostly as a unit, and the players match their tones and timbres so effectively that they often sound like a single instrument. Pianist John Tilbury is an eloquent presence throughout the disc, delivering the fractured arpeggios of Piano and String Quartet eloquently.

There are a few extraneous audience noises on the recording, made live at the 2006 Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, but with performances as involving as these, that hardly matters. DAVID KETTLE

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