Morton Feldman (1926-1987)
Intermission 6 (1953)
Antti Tolvi, piano
rec. 2024, Westers, Kiila, Finland
Another Timbre AT241 [72]

Morton Feldman’s Intermission 6 is one of his first open form pieces. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music defines open form as ‘a structural procedure whereby the sequence and/or construction of parts of a notated work are variable’. Readers may be familiar with some of John Cage’s pieces which allow musicians to make choices which have a profound effect on the outcome of a performance, or perhaps even Pierre Boulez’s homage to literary modernism in his Third Piano Sonata, where the ordering of movements is to a large extent left to the player, but Intermission 6 is arguably more radical. The score is a single page. It has fifteen fragments of music randomly scattered across it, for all the world as if Feldman had scribbled them on a napkin in a restaurant. I say fragments: most are simple noteheads without stems, some are single notes in the treble or bass clef, some are chords, some are grace notes, two have rests in front of them and one is prefaced by a fermata. Feldman provides the following direction: ‘Composition begins with any sound and proceeds to any other. With a minimum of attack hold each sound until barely audible. Grace notes are not played too quickly. All sounds are to be played as soft as possible’. That’s it.

Of the performances of the piece I know (in one or two piano versions) the longest hitherto are those by Philip Thomas in the definitive boxed set of the Piano Music (AT144). He plays it three times, scattered across the discs, performances of around 8, 5 and 11 minutes, strikingly different from each other.  Enter Antti Tolvi, a Finnish pianist whose background is in experimental music. In an interesting interview on the Another Timbre website, he says he moved from ‘punkish’ beginnings to free jazz and improvised music, playing with a group and in a style that became known as ‘Forest folk’. He’s also fascinated by North Indian classical music and minimalism. He’s not classically trained and I wonder if that hasn’t been an advantage in his approach to this piece and the extraordinary vision he has shown. That vision in the first place is one of scale, and the possibilities it creates. He started by playing Intermission 6 for (just!) 40 minutes: ‘40 minutes came easily, like no problem, and I was enjoying a lot. So I continued. Somewhere maybe around 70 minutes I thought “is this good now?”  But then, well, somehow the piece just took me to some new dimension or something, and it felt that the music was always going somewhere new, and not repeating itself at all. After about 2 hours I just thought, “wow!, maybe this is good now!’’ ‘

Simon Reynell of Another Timbre shared Tolvi’s vision and, having heard that two-hour performance, asked him to record a version that would fit onto a single CD. I’ve been living with that recording for over two months now. Several times I’ve come to write about it and paused, thinking, perhaps I’ll just listen to it one more time. Tolvi says that Feldman’s music has a ‘weird draw’ for him and his performance of Intermission 6 certainly does for this listener. It seems to me that Tolvi has recognised several key things and been able to scale them in a way no other performer has previously. ‘Scale’ is pretty obvious temporally, of course, but it’s what that extended canvas apparently permits that is so startling. I have never been so struck before, for example, by the beauty of some of those individual chords and the overwhelming aesthetic effect that the different sequencing of Feldman’s fragments can produce. But there’s also the mesmerising effect that the decay of sound has here and its key influence on the dynamic of this performance. Crucially, there is too the role of silence. One is conscious ultimately of the amount of time Tolvi has spent with the work and how that enables him to inhabit it completely. There’s a shape to his realisation which is compelling, achieved as he says above without any sense of repetition, and an extraordinary sonic ambience maintained throughout, which is some achievement given the very quiet nature of the music and the middle and upper registers of the piano it inhabits. Incidentally, I wish I could share with you a picture of the waveform of the performance – it’s a work of art in itself.

This, then, might be one of the most surprising Feldman releases in his centenary year, but it’s surely one he would have thoroughly approved of and welcomed. As will, I suspect, anyone who listens to it.

Dominic Hartley