Thursday 10 March 2016, 6.30pm
The great pianist, John Tilbury, presents the first UK performance of Morton Feldman's extraordinary late work, for Christian Wolff, with flautist Carla Rees and Tilbury on piano/celeste.
Please note that the duration of the piece is 3 hours and as such, doors will be at 6.30pm, with the performance starting at 7pm sharp.
“First performed in 1986, a little over a year before his death, Morton Feldman's For Christian Wolff belongs with the other vast, obsessive scores of his final years, such as For Philip Guston and the Second String Quartet. This is a single movement for flute and keyboard (piano doubling celesta), lasting almost three hours... In such a vastly expanded musical landscape the smallest shift or inflection assumes huge significance, while the tonal variety Feldman wrings from this limited palette is extraordinary.” – The Guardian
John Tilbury is renowned for his peerless interpretation of the piano music of Morton Feldman, John Cage, Christian Wolff and Howard Skempton. In addition to the performances and seminal recordings that he has made of these composers’ works, he has been an eloquent advocate of their music in his writing and speaking about them. The same is true of the attention he has paid to the music and ideas of Cornelius Cardew, the subject of his authoritative biography published in 2008, and with whom he played in the legendary improvisation groups the Scratch Orchestra and AMM. In the last ten years John Tilbury has performed a range of plays and prose pieces by Samuel Beckett.
Video by Helen Petts
Carla Rees is a UK-based low flutes player and arranger. She is the artistic director of rarescale, an ensemble which exists to promote the alto flute and its repertoire, and Director of low flutes publishing company, Tetractys. She plays Kingma System flutes and works frequently in collaboration with composers to develop new repertoire and techniques.
