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Morton Feldman’s Neither in US Professional Stage Premiere at New York City Opera

Mar. 01, 2011

Contemporary music, art, design and dance collide in an unprecedented triple bill of monodramas at New York City Opera this month. Central to the program is the US Professional Stage premiere of Morton Feldman’s haunting work Neither, performed by Cyndia Sieden. A captivating, ethereal soundscape with a libretto by Samuel Beckett, Neither tests the highest extremes of the soprano range, investigating altered states of mind and awareness. Directed by Michael Counts and featuring choreography by Ken Roht with video art by Jennifer Steinkamp and motionographer Ada Whitney, Monodramas is a unique, engrossing exploration of the feminine subconscious.

Neither is joined on the program by the world premiere of John Zorn’s La Machine de l’être and Schönberg’s Erwartung. Conducted by George Manahan, Monodramas debuts on March 25 with five additional performances through April 8.

Morton Feldman’s Rothko Chapel was featured on the Lincoln Center concert series Tully Scope on February 24 in a performance by the Axiom ensemble, of The Juilliard School, and the Clarion Choir conducted by Jeffrey Milarsky. The performance closed out a month in which the work was performed on both coasts of the US (the San Francisco Symphony presented its first-ever performances with Michael Tilson Thomas) and in Houston by Da Camera. Anthony Tommasini commented on the performance at Tully Scope:

… the austerely beautiful, daringly static and pervasively quiet Rothko Chapel… is perhaps the most defining work of Feldman’s inimitable art. Rothko Chapel unfolds as a series of fragmentary viola lines, flickers of notes on the celesta, isolated wordless chords intoned by the chorus and subdued rhythmic figures in the percussion. Little shifts of harmony or fleeting pileups of instrumental sounds seem major musical events. But nothing disrupts the overall mood of ethereal beauty and spiritual loneliness.

Until late in the piece, that is, when out of nowhere the viola plays a wistful “quasi-Hebraic” melody, in Feldman’s term, a tune he had written as a teenager. Given the memorial nature of the piece, this uncharacteristic Feldman stroke seems spiritually right and musically gratifying.

Learn more on the life and work of Morton Feldman at www.universaledition.com.

Morton Feldman
Neither (1977)
opera in one act
libretto (En) by Samuel Beckett
for soprano and orchestra
3(2.pic, 3.afl).3(3.ca).3(3.bcl)3.cbsn-3.3.3.1-4perc-2hp.pno-str
55’

Rothko Chapel (1971)
for soprano, alto, mixed choir and instruments
celesta, viola and percussion
30’

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