The Music of Silence: Steven Osborne plays Crumb & Feldman

Steven Osborne’s second Milton Court recital this season is dedicated to the American avant-garde composers Morton Feldman and George Crumb. While they come from divergent philosophical standpoints, Steven chose to highlight their shared obsession with the ‘sound’ aspect of music by combining Crumb and Feldman in one programme. Four days earlier, Hyperion will release Steven’s recording of the same works.

The programme features two works from the beginning of Feldman’s career – Intermission 5 and Extensions 3, both composed in 1952 – as well as his last solo piano composition, Palais de Mari, written more than 30 years later, in 1986. Crumb’s Processional (1980) is the only of his piano works not to use extended techniques, whereas A Little Suite for Christmas – inspired by Giotto’s frescoes in Padua – is more characteristic in its striking use of pedals.

As Steven explains, Crumb’s music is essentially traditional in its view of what music does, working with the sensual quality of sound to create different images. He was hugely influenced by the disembodied sounds he would go and listen for at night in the forests of West Virginia where he grew up. This sense of “open space and things subtly intruding in it” is, according to Steven, something particularly palpable in A Little Suite for Christmas.

A disciple of John Cage, Feldman on the other hand was influenced by the idea that as a composer, you can create something without controlling it and let the material be itself. His music – “a world of non-directional gestures” as Steven describes it – therefore tries to avoid any sense of internal logic and development. By drawing his audience into an experience of the moment rather than admiring the separate “art-object”, Feldman makes it impossible for the listener to be able to analyse what’s happening or give the work context.

While Steven has performed Crumb’s Processional on a number of occasions – most recently at Southbank Centre’s International Piano Series – this is only the second public outing of the remainder of the works on the programme which he first performed at Antwerp’s deSingel where he was Artist-in-Residence last season.