Performers: Mira Benjamin (violin 1), Chihiro Ono (violin 2), Amalia Young (violin 3), Bridget Carey (viola), Anton Lukoszevieze (cello)
Playing time: 129'
Recording date: September 2022 (Norfolk); released: 2023
Release note: The online release consists of 4 tracks, i.e. the two CDs (per above) split in two, and comes in a 24bit/48khz format.
As noted in the update/insertion to the main discussion, I've really come to appreciate this new interpretation. Apartment House itself apparently began as a strings group, i.e. before even recording for Another Timbre, so this is a return to their roots in some sense.... And of course they'd been recording late Feldman (for Another Timbre), at first just the performers without the name Apartment House, but now under that name since 2021's Piano and String Quartet. I found their reading of the latter warm work to be on the ascerbic side, but their reedy precision (& its harmonics) really works here.
It's also not the case, per my introductory remarks back in 2012, that the "solo" violin really balances against the quartet here either: It's more prominent, but the piece tends to present more as a string quintet, not in formal alternation.... It's more the different voicings & shifting articulations, tensional registers more generally, that account for the moment-to-moment variety of the piece.
In any case, the double album has been holding my attention, making for a rewarding (but also sometimes troubling...) daytime tapestry around the apartment.... It can seem a bit ominous, since after all, stories of doom circulate constantly these days, but there's a sort of (more uplifting, human) affective modulation that draws one in as well....
For the moment at least, I think this has actually become my favorite Feldman album (after more ambivalent reactions to the group's earlier Feldman albums). Or maybe it's too dark.
To purchasing information for this disc.
To Feldman page.
T. M. McComb Updated: 10 July 2023