Feldman - For Bunita Marcus

The Guardian 80

Marc-André Hamelin
(Hyperion)

Composed in 1985, two years before Morton Feldman’s death, For Bunita Marcus has become one of the most frequently recorded of all his works, and one of the few of his pieces that shows signs of moving beyond the exclusive territory of new-music specialists and into the mainstream piano repertory. It also provides a perfect and, at around 80 minutes, a relatively concise introduction to the timeless, pared-down world of late Feldman, with its webs of repeating, minutely displaced motives, hanging harmonies and absolute avoidance of anything that could be construed as conventional musical rhetoric.

Marc-André Hamelin presents that world of microscopic nuances with immaculate care. There’s none of the impatience that characterised Ivan Ilić’s reading of For Bunita Marcus two years ago; everything in Hamelin’s performance seems part of a natural, inevitable unfolding, and the Hyperion recording perfectly catches all its details, and clouds of decaying sonorities that colour every silence. As Hamelin shows, the empty spaces in Feldman’s piano writing are as important as the pitches themselves.