Feldman's long durational music, the music he wrote the last (more-or-less) ten years of his life, works best in the piano genre, for which this is the only work. The other pieces as the 4 hour "For Christian Wolff" for Flute and Piano, the 6 Hour "String Quartet", seem not to have the substance to travel the musically long durational seas. Timbre and how its employed distributed is the place here where this argument turns. For example the extended techniques in the 6 Hour "String Quartet", drains one's listening constitution very quickly(at least mine), and these pieces need to live a multiple life of their own,not depending upon a programmatic(that is not here) and again the piano solo genre seems to be perfectly suited, perfectly endowed with the 'seeds', the means for long durational lengths, "sailing the seas depends upon the helmsman", said Mao in another context, and here the timbre of the piano is the helmsman.
The piano timbre has a rich,seemingly endless diversity in the touch to the keys that we sense, from threadbare,pencil thin and drained to overly resonant and rich,(well more overtones engaged). Feldman certainly drew from this grand table of timbral gradations. What one can sense as this piece unfolds is like examining timbre under a microscope. The beauty here is especially compelling when chords with half-steps in them gracefully decay and we hear the beats,the pulse of the relative dissonance.Here Nonken's choice of metronomic indication allows these 'treasures' to exhibit themselves. Nonken is faster than Hinterhausen clocking in at circa 94 minutes, while Hinternausen's is well over 100 minutes.
I think Nonken understands these points of beauty and how they enable themselves to interface with tempi but I found she trys to make music sometimes,tries to reach for points of comprehension,engaging what the minds already knows, (said Jasper Johns) especially the first 50 minutes, meaning she doesn't allow the music to be simply as it is;To depart from what the mind knows. And this is where this work, works best when we can forget our own musical memory, those gestures engrained in ourselves.Without approaching the pretencious, a piece like this does "cleanse"(a transgressive term) one of one's memory.But I would be remiss here if I didn't admit that a piece of this peace relative tranquility and length does work on the body as well as the mind.So the danger of the work(in performing it) is where it seems to suggest(in shapes and phrases and gestures) more than what it is. And there are many points in the music where this occurs, as the straight eighth notes like art song accompaniment materials.There are similar problems in Feldman's various "concerti" where Stravinskian and the literature of dodecaphonic gestures are suggested "Oboe & Orchestra", "Piano & Orchestra" This is all relative, for she does much of the time let's the work wind and caress over her,like a wind(glass or wood) chimes forests. And I prefer Nonken's recording in the end to all else.
Hinterhausen seems to see with a large telescope where the piece is going a rare feat, for how does one practice this? and again this is all relative folks, Hinterhausen seems to know the distance he needs to travel, and the 'locis' moment to moment musical gestures then seems less compelling than Nonken. Nonken's is more engaging (again a relative term for Feldman) than the Hinterhausen, Nonken virtually finds timbral beauty in each moment The production values in Nonken's (Jason Eckardt's production) trekking to the famous Krannert Center Concert Hall at the University of Illinois Urbana(not far from Chicago) bears much timbral fruit here as we cross the Mediterranean for musical boxes,and treasures. Sir Georg Solti also loved this hall, dragging the Chicago Symphony Orchestra down there for recording sessions of Mahler.

We hear each moment as if the piano is right in front of us;an introspective expeience which the music demands. I don't know if "Triadic Memories" is music for the concert venue, it seems better suited as a pure piece of recorded art.
The Tilbury recording as well reaches for beauty from moment to moment, Tilbury has been known to coax the most warmest timbre from the most coldly abstracted pieces of the avant-garde he once played.

The Rotterdam Philharmonic have a wonderfully powerful sound, it is a bit gritty(that's interesting and good),and hard-edged, and its not due to the modernist showcase here. It is a sound I believe that is cultivated at all levels of the instrumental cadre. Gergiev is quite an engaging live wire, deeply probing the war-like narrative of Prokofiev's "Scythian Suite" at many levels. This was a ballet that Diaghliev requested and was never produced by him. Gergiev certainly knows the performing problems, the Prokofiev aesthetic. "This piece has been played too loud, which is why it was not good, and never had a history. . ." Here I'm paraphrasing. We learn that loud is not always real loud or super loud, that to play Prokofiev what needs to be acknowledge are the gradations of dynamics.Instrumental colour as well with celesta and piano and harp to help punctuate the plucked strings or the bombastic brass. ". . . this is an army that I think is going to win. . .". Gergiev says) So they need to have this spirit imparted through the music notes." . . . trombones the last chord should be like, you go, you go, you go, and the last one you kill. . . " a bit more." Short asides also point to Gergiev intense deep knowledge of the music, that Prokofiev was mindful of how far Stravinsky had mover. "This music is about mysticism, energy and power, and colour. . . ". Prokofiev looked backwards to narratives and histories of Mother Russia as was the times,it is a way to see if anything changes, and indeed no. National persuasions was always part of culture yesterday and today. War is still a vibrant lucrative business.
I found the Stravinsky "Piano Concerto" less intense, although after the opening dirge-like gesture it takes off in a wild frenzy of asymmetrical rhythmic dialogues with the piano obviously the winner take all here. This is a neoclassic work and Gergiev's temperment seems to draw too much from the piece, going after phrases and many times affirming the power of the music, something if left alone would happen anyway. The piano soloist Alexander Toradze accomodated this off-center vision of the work. There should be a bit of cool restrain I think to all this neo-classic period, a mannered gestural phase that looked backwards. Also "Fireworks" is an early immature work a stepping stones to a larger massive places of "Firebird" and "Le sacre", and "Petrouska".
The Debussy was well played as well, nothing too challenging save for the balanced timbre and the deep lyricism. Debussy was much into plainchant simple melos, and again Rotterdam makes a seemless timbre, a sound you are simply drawn towards, escaping into the sound.

The rehearsal process especially with contemporary music has become an important component to the experience of listening. I wish there was even more of these rehearsals available on DVD. But alas! Jansons as other have said is most honest and straightforward, no nonsense approach.He recounts his formative years with vintage photos. His work with Mravinsky,von Karajan and his father. And the musicians respond wonderfully to him with passion and intellect.
Bartok's ballet score here is now a classic hiding in the shadows of Le Sacre du printemps of Stravinsky.Jansons highlights the storyline so the musicians know where they are going. Yet Bartok had his own voice with here wonderful reedy moments in the bassoon plainchant folky laments, and misterioso harmonies. Bartok had interesting concepts of orchestration frequently using the piano and harp and plucked strings to colour the timbre and musical shape.Also allowing specific colours as the clarinet (the erotic sensual parts) to emerge. Jansons complaints are perhaps always the same. The music is not mysterious enough or opaque enough. He sings a noise to the strings ". . . the sul ponticello(playing at the bridge) must be like sheeeeeeeeee", I must not hear the bow and the rhythm. And the tromboni "it is too strong and the phrase should be much more legato. . . " this with a snarl for the muted trombones.". . . this is virtuoso music, very difficult. . . " he keeps exclaiming. The orchestral players at Oslo are allowed to speak about Jansons, and again they respect him. We see them during a break pouring black coffee, or lighting up a small cigar or cigarette.Oslo plays wonderful, the music actually sounds already rehearsed and finsihed. It is a magnificent sound throughout.

It is quite incredible that the genre of the Symphonie lives on after Mahler. Mahler's Ninth Symphonie was a farewell to beauty,the Master Signifier and the images of childhood, the fragmented yet challenging experience of the metropolis. The transgression of beauty was to cloud over Europe in ways Mahler's imagination could hardly fathom. With Hartmann the Symphonie lives in a exiled world, it is not one free to speak, it is one where the voice, (as Agamben says someplace) carries Being, yet in what form? It is a voice smashed from the SS jackboots, a voice of the dispossessed and the homeless.

It is only the Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Symphonies of Hartmann which bear any fruit or reveal great timbral vigours. The others are to my ears like stepping stones to these massive timbral canvasses.

Timbre itself in Hartmann is allowed freedom only within well-prescribed, well-disciplined forms as canons and fugal discourse.Musical development is watched,guarded like Bentham's Panoptikon.Usually the darkest colours are allowed to commence the fugue as a bassoon or viola, never a bright trumpet as in Mahler.The string body is stretched in uncomfortable positions within the highest registers yet at loud and louder dynamic levels. Mahler as well took the strings upwards to render an ugly strident timbre, one devoid of love sometimes hope and beauty. Hartmann now has seen the full vagaries of modernity and has sniffed the sulphur of war of the twentieth century.So there are no escapist movements to render here as the beautiful Adagio from Mahler's Fifth Symphonie. He Hartmann has lived as a recluse hiding from the Nazi propaganda machines where his music inhabits only a hidden place in a wooden trunk or chest of drawers, bound with rope.

Both these Symphonies display virtuosic elements the Symphonie has hardly seen before, with an ample body of the percussive world to ring great resonances from the tortured orchestral body. The brass as well are not so declamatory but function as increasing the energy levels,like the heat from a blast furnace, with melodic lines forever reaching for the sky like the smokestakes of Krupp Works. The anxiety levels the power of the Symphonie is given a voice, but one with a renewed view of the world, a detestable one.

Conductor Metzmacher fully understands this philosophy, his career has been magnitized toward preserving the remainders of modernity, of the progressive with devoted performance work to the late Luigi Nono. Here he summons the power of these late Hartmann Symphonies fully aware of their classical proportions.

Despite all the super-ficialities expounded on the negative features of this work Derrida the man who probes behind things,times and durations, meanings of: words, seeing, touching, feeling.,all this is here for one to contemplate(or not)
So it was a California Crew (who made this film) Who needs to get some market Hook into their subject; living in Hollywood does that to people, New York is even worse. But leaving this, Jacques comes through here discussing, "hands" that hands age whereas the "eyes" are those as childhood, the act of looking has no age.

What about Love?
"I cannot speak in generalities about love" . . . "You must ask, pose a question".
This leads anyway to a brief excursion, "exergue" into what is BEing, that we love something, or someone, we love a person, but do we simply love things, qualities about that person,or the person him/herself eradicating the qualities, Tough question since "does he she make alotta of money"(end of quote)or have a fantastic body something Americans seem to be interested(obsessed)with/ in, especially when a film is being made.

The graphics the cinemagraphic feel(s) are fantastic the opening of the movement in a car it what looks like on-his-way-to work Paris it has a wonderful rhythm,the overweight apartment buildings (Six High, Ten across) slowing gliding on (the unseen road) like a wave. Derrida even probes the idea of "archive" what is testimony in the very act of making a film. He kindly explains to his Parisian class on this intrusion with a film crew to his left, " a gauche"

We see his library to the ceiling in a modest part of the home, the entire place is small,cramped, more contemplative.

"Did you read all these books?"

No "I read about four five of them, but I read those five very well"

We see him buttering a bagel or English muffin with sometransparent-like light-green/brown jelly anda large cup of black coffee,gently then returning the glass lid to the butter container: some breakfast! then saying good buy to his wife Marguerite also off to work.

Derrida has a wonderfully elegant glass office,computer dominating the desk with typical assortment of books mixed with writing ledgers with tablets,hard ansd softcards, scrap paper (S)outside; well with a glass ceiling and glass walls/windows to the front off his yard, no flowers just green; with interesting green elegant plants placed, mostly inside.

He visits Nelson Mandela's cell of 18 years on Robyn Island South Africa.Quite powerful boat ride. Then discusses "forgiveness" to a primarially white student body.Derrida believes in "irony" that it should challenge the commonsense, what we expect. We are always compelled to give the answer everyone already expects to hear. So "improvisation" is also important for it disrupts the stereotypical discourse we hear everyday.

We see him "thinking" as well, When asked a question like "Can/If your mother could have been a philospher and if she was how would that have changed things"

"Give me a moment. . . ." . . . it is a good question. . . "

There can never be "pure forgiveness" but "to forgive" to further a cause, or fashion change through forgeveness some part of reality,of time or the future(l'avenir) Derrida endorses.

There is some walking in this film as well as the opening crossing a street "Watch Out! Derrida exclaims (not shouting) to his hosts in New York University.". . . like the philosopher looking at the stars while falling into a well. . . "

If you are unfamiliar with Derrida, this is a good place to start, there are well tthought of excerpts spoken over the images and motions and movements, amnay from "Archive Fever"

His exposition of Echo and Narcissus was also interesting,, "all speech is blind" for it stops whatever else can be thought. And what then of philosophy, that it has wandered through history that it has always fed on its own anxiety, its own pain.

"I would have liked Hegel and Heidegger to speak about their sex lives"

Why?"

"Well it is something they never spoke about, they always kept their personal lives out of their texts."

If you are a devoted pianist this book will ring inside you, the daily arduous burdens of practice of interpretation, learning music,traveling. Richter was a fabulous deep thinking pianist,he knew how to tame/channel his emotions,serving the music but this lifeworld complexity hardly comes through between-th-lines for he was not a writer.If you are a performing musician you can finish Richter's thought. We cannot be all things to all people.

He reports on concerts, his own and recordings,his own(largely he was always displeased) The incredible scope of his career,traveling much after 1960 spanning decades,living through the darkest pages of Soviet Russia, all this comes through his directly functional words. His power as pianist was not forcing his career, allowing himself time to develop a repertoire and more importantly reflect upon it.His first teacher Neuhaus said his tone was brittle, to concentrated, it needed to "breath" more, and he learned this.His Schubert for example(a "breathing" composer) was come to very late, as the G major Sonata that befuddles many pianists. There is no substitute for what time and duration does to one's playing, this is something hardly ever learned by cigar-chomping agents. Make a quick Buck! Hell with interpretation and Hell! with music as it should be.

Richter had incredible power as a pianist, many conductors will reveal how he can consume the work,as Gennady Rozhdestvensky will reveal. The orchestra must hold its own, as in the Brahms Bb Concerto, or Tchaikovsky.Although Richter to my own ears, only found great interpretive conviction in Rachmaninov and Prokofiev, two composers he felt were very close to each other, and to himself. (although Prokofiev would never openly admit this. Scriabin and Chopin as well Richter had great strength under the surface ornamentations,extended colouful harmonies and brooding darknesses.

He claimed he only practiced three hours a day unless he was given a work to learn quickly as Prokoviev did with his late Sonatas. But given Richter's incredible memory I doubt this.

There is chronolgy(almost day to day) of Richter's life beginning in 1970 given here in concerts.

There are also nice vintage photos of his travels.

The new music seminars situated at Darmstadt that began after WW2 has become an important mecca retrospectively for contemporary music, anyone who is anybody has given talks there and has performed.(perhaps not Phil Glass, he found the music "scary")
The earliest generation is here those who began it as Karlheinz Stockhausen. If you have read any interviews with Pierre Boulez he claims he taught there only a few years. But Darmstadt was important in fashioning the post-Webern way of thinking post-dodecaphonic, 12 Tone Serial, where all the perameters of music tone, dynamic, articulation, duration was subjected to the "tyranny" of the 12, almost Kabballah-like minus the historical depth. And with any movement (as for instance Cubism Futurism, Dada) everyone who contributes to it brings/carves and finds/locates their own voice, and that certainly what has happened at Darmstadt. The "ends" of things in innovation in music were explored, and even Theodor Adorno(a generation older) was present arguing nicely and forcefully with the youngsters there that serialized music may have become a "sport" that was quickly exhausted by the end of the Fifties. Let's have a new work let's try this Adorno would exclaim, "how about a piece for Three Orchestras"" How about a piece for Voice and Percussion", How about a piece for Two Pianos", no innovation just "newness" for the sake of it"We haven't done that yet"Creators as Xenakis and Ligeti, and Penderecki certainly saw through this and another means(that of clusters, mists, arborencences) conceptually thinking about texture, timbre register. Boulez even said that he found it overly cumbersome to have to be forced to use all 12 Tones, when he was contented with writings exploiting the first 4 to 6.

I was rather disappointed in the playing here save for the Boulez "trope" from his Third Sonata. This was wonderfully aggressive inventive playing, you really sense the deep musicianship of Boulez something his other Darmstadt brethren tended to ignore as Stockhausen. The Boulez Third Sonata has a massive pallette of timbre, the use of all the pianos pedals as well as the entire registers of the keyboard, attack, and arpeggiation, staccato mixed with sustained.You always need to find a direction of this music jumping in and oput of registers. It does have a direction, and if you become lost, Well! you stay lost. It was impassioned playing.
Whereas the Stockhausen first 5 klavierstuck (piano pieces)(here referred to as Number 2,under one leaf book tyhat is)) were somewhat wihtdrawn timid and reserved. These pieces are about raw uninhibted timbre,lots of fortissimos, about musical space, High Middle and Low, Regions of excavations, (Loud is in front of you, Soft is hinterlands off in space) take yer ear oof. If you ever have heard Fredric Rzewski play these or the late David Tudor, or the Kontarsky Brothers (recall the early CBS-Box-Set Vinyl) this playing is rather uninspired. Perhaps all that John Cage playing has rendered the conceptual affinity for sound rather differently. These "klavierstuck" are incredible but you need to forget everything you have learned about the piano and simply think of it as a sound=producing box, like electronic music, simply register, klang. Likewise the Evangelisti was uninspired playing, much silnces with no real emotive of structural reason,quite boring,and it needn't be. Evangelisti died early unfortunately he was a wonderful contributor to the post Webern realm here and frequently utilizes graphic notation.

The Messiaen work is rather long and difficult to sustain interest,it has more dimensions to it than readily apparent but this was one of Messiaen's more extroverted innovative works relatively speaking, for 'Vingt Regard sur l'enfant Jesus' is the massive encyclopedic dimensions of the modernist piano for which all other of his works is seen and judged.

Mowitt explores the heretofore unmentionables within the discourse of music analysis and musicological dimensions. His primary orientation is that the percussive world and any discussion of it has been through social filters,"imported" concepts from academia that not always shares such dimensions of illumination. By introducing such diverse concepts as Althusseur's "interpellation"(cross-referencial disciplines rather than one seminal kernel) and Adorno's theory of the demise of content within an administered world Mowitt finds a wholly unique approach here making sense out of senseless beating. So the "percussive field" is like a special preserve and then treated very much like a pure language to itself. The relative cloistered universe of musical academia has seen little use for such social and political dimensions; whereas Mowitt confronts these cognitive material aspects directly.

He begins with the idea that music in particular percussion music(beating, striking, banging) can be and is/implies a coherent language that is rooted in a "socialness" and has a unique discourse of representation. Percussion music recall has been a special preserve for innovation as the early 1930s works of composer Edgar Varese later John Cage. In fact one can usually determine if a composer, a creator understands timbre strictly from the sensitivity to percussive timbre. It seems to be the last dimension within any musical oeuvre that develops.
Interestingly Mowitt refers to our primordial forms of the aesthetic of tribes beating on their/Our bodies. And there is a wealth of timbre from the body, filled with or unfilled with cavities, resonating "boxes". He is quite well-read and draws many fascinating pathways not only into World music but Popular culture, Chuck Berry. And examines how the "beat, the backbeat as in "Get Off My Cloud" by the Rolling Stones. He seems to imply that the beat has all the necessary language and subversion we often miss. We need to get away from the market tyranny of contemplating music, of placing music into a pre-determined set and serial means of styles and genres. Mowitt, implies that understanding is lost with market formulas.

The vast music edifice and oceanic durational frames within the piano solo works of Sorabji can be distinguishable into expressive realms, places, imaginative and real, images, icons, forms, shapes, and places and means of discourse as sequential musical patternings works merely for ornamental excursion as "Gulistan" and here certain parts and moments of the "Passeggiata veneziana"(herafter Pv).

The Italianate expressive strain in Sorabji is prevalent and pervasive in that his mother was Sicilian. Her family name - Malvitrano di Sanctis- is a common within the inhabitants of Palermo. The other strain or discourse refers to moments(the linear perceptions) within the history of music. Perhaps the 1830s with Robert Schumann's "Carnaval" a reaction to the staid statis of what was becoming Romaticism, the frozen structural dynamics of the Beethoven aesthetic. We find then the works of Listz in contradistinction, an aesthetic more extroverted,more self-indulgent, caustic, not afraid of failure, and conceptually free. The materials generated are from the programmatic as we have known in particular the"travelling" ones the"Soirees italiennes" or the "Venezia e Napoli" the appendix to the second, Italian book of his "Annees de pelerinage". This patrilinear quest then finds Ferruccio Busoni next perhaps the most vibrant influence on Sorabji.Busoni's excursions extend to his "Passeggiata arlecchinsca" or the "Rondo arlecchinesco" But without this perspective of Listz, Busoni's oeuvre and Sorabji for that matter means little.

The "Pv" is constructed much like a free divertissment suite, it renders itself admirably as a written almost free improvisation something Listz had proclaimed and practiced with his operatic transcriptions, yet Sorabji lends a far deeper expressive dimension to this genre.We hardly sense the "tyranny" of time in Sorabji. The music is free. It does get "stuck" with repetitive moments, as arpeggiated-like octaves and thirds, a Listian device.But we are carried along with Offenbach's well-known melody, the "Barcarola" from the "Tales of Hoffmann". Yes it is subtle here, like a nuance a "fragrance" and Sorabji was well aware of the amount of cognitive/perceptive "space" for the listener a popular melody would hold a magnetic listening power.

The work unfolds something like a variations yet seemless you never sense where one movement ends and another begins, simply textural, timbral changes, even the rollicking "Tarantella" is a breath of air here.

On a more serious plateau we have the "Villa Tasca" subtitled "mezzogiorno siciliano evocazione nostalgico" and is prefaced by Mallarme's phrase "le fer silence du midi".It is about the imaginative time we sense and feel from real time. There are many associative images here all hovering in places the "Sicilian Muleteer's Song, We find this in the final moments of this lamost one-hour work. Sorabji's music is always compelling in the sheer beuaty of the piano timbre, the upper register filigrees, quite dense yet you.one always senses a direction, landing in places, very much like the anxieties associated with the dialectic of travel, fusing the real with the imaginative. There was a felt "collectivity" that Sorabji drew from his experiences in Sicily and his thoughts, and renders the exquisite timbres here like "spun silk" with multifarious arabesques and numinous ornamentations as Ronald Stevensen ( a close friend and scholar of Sorabji's music)The connection to the East is a felt one in that Sicily had an Arab population and it is this history that seems to hover within the work. Concretely musically it remains to be heard. The work was completed in 1979, one of the last.

Jonathan Powell brings a well passioned yet visionary beauty to both works, impeccably disciplined but allowing the works to be what they are.

Hartmann's primary, seminal works are his "Symphonies", in particular, the Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth. The others seem tentative studies, creative stepping stones. He had an incredible imagination for orchestral timbre for his generation despite the fact that he found no great interest in dodecaphonic music, nor the timbral structural innovations of Webern. When we come then to his piano music however, this lifeworld seems to have been left behind in a hidden drawer. Perhaps the same wooden drawer he had kept his creations in, refusing to promote his music during the dark pages surrounding him with Nazis marching through the streets. (Wolfgang Rihm has similar problems in that his piano music doesn't seem as imaginatively engaged as his other works.)

Hartmann's structural affinities remains with large-scale form so here his "Sonata April 27,1945" dedicated for those who died under fascism is a work that contains/treks through these darknesses, the gloom and dismal anxiety, but it lacks imaginative power Perhaps the composer facing a blank sheet of music paper seems imprisoned by the times he lived, and the imagination is transfomed, not a vibrant process that, at some point should equal the horrific events unfolding during the time he lived.Picasso's "Guernica" is a wonderful example where the horror, and outrage found a visual language that is torn with asymetrical shapes and abstractions.
As in his powerful(brutal and violent) three last Symphonies, you do sense in Hartmann that music has been pulverized,stamped,mangled under a boot, that the melos of the lifeworld cannot speak freely,(he is fond of imitative linear writing as fugues, and canons).Hartmanns creativity is an administered melos, it is an orchestral sound impacted, brilliant though with ample clangorous metal percussion,it is/was a spirit locked with uncertainty. And certainly this "Sonata" has a burdened weight as the 3rd movement "Marcia funebre (Lento) that is 11:35 in duration.

The two "suites"included here seem to breath more in"Suite No.2" for instance there is a gorgeous melody "Fliessend" contented with itself, it could have been longer without taxing the listener. This was followed by a movement simply entitled "Jazz".This seem to be a "dabbling" in a quasi-innovative musical language.

Hartmann's linear writing in most of this piano music seems arbitrary, it is neither tonal, nor atonal, but inhabits more a free spontaneous chromatic language, that has no way of pulling one forwardor directing the listening experience, nor creating tensions(resolved, unresolved) except through dynamic loudness, or rhythmic intensity.

I thought this problematic may have worked in shorter forms as the "Sonatine" here a toccata like work of about 8 minutes durations. But again the tensions do not seem to augment themselves and pitch one forward overwhelmingly power as we find again in the (clutching-your-hands-to-the-seat) latter Symphonies.