This is a marvelous release, equally perfect in conception, execution, and engineering. The program locates the intellectual origins of the American avant-garde composers
Morton Feldman and
John Cage not in postwar European developments, but in the music of
Erik Satie, who with each decade seems a more pioneering figure.
Feldman and
Cage here seem not modernists, but postmodernists. Front and center at the beginning is
Feldman's masterpiece
Rothko Chapel (1967), a chamber-ensemble-and-chorus evocation of the Houston, Texas, chapel adorned with paintings by, and partly designed by, the Abstract Expressionist painter
Mark Rothko. The album thus reflects local roots for the
Houston Chamber Choir, hitherto a solid regional ensemble but hardly suspected capable of the heights they achieve here. The implications of the
Feldman are spun out in works by
Cage -- the choral realizations of the works entitled
Four2 and
Five are quite unusual -- and retrospectively connected to
Satie, the latter played with a full sense of their significance by pianist
Sarah Rothenberg.
Rothko Chapel was meant to be performed in the actual chapel, but it's hard to fault
ECM for choosing a pair of Texas auditoria instead: the results are sonically stunning. The explosive surprises in
Satie's pieces, which do indeed link them to the shocks
Cage would later offer, come through with incredible intensity; auditioned on an inexpensive stereo the sonics are gripping, and it's hard to imagine what joys await the possessor of equipment truly capable of realizing
ECM's engineering work. Very highly recommended. ~ James Manheim
