John Tilbury, Morton Feldman, The Smith Quartet

This is the first volume of a Matchless series devoted to Morton Feldman's music for piano and strings, played by John Tilbury and The Smith Quartet. It pairs two late works of extreme length, For John Cage (1982) for violin and piano, and Piano and String Quartet (1985), each lasting close to an hour and a half. Neither fits on a compact disc without a break, so the label chose DVD for the whole series. The disc plays on a DVD player or a computer drive, and the screen stays black for almost all of the music.

Both performances come from the 2006 Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, where Tilbury and the quartet gave ten recitals covering all of Feldman's works for piano and strings. The players are Ian Humphries and Darragh Morgan on violins, Nic Pendlebury on viola and Deirdre Cooper on cello. Tilbury had been performing Feldman since 1960 and is one of his most closely associated interpreters. In his booklet essay Howard Skempton hears Feldman's chords as close to the cool jazz of the 1940s and 1950s, and links the music's touch to the minimising of attack: the quartet plays with Baroque bows. He describes For John Cage as an exercise in rhythmic dislocation and the manipulation of time, while Piano and String Quartet observes time slipping away. Writing about the series in Point of Departure in 2012, Michael Rosenstein called the quartet piece "a hyper-focused dive into the resonances of the five instruments", and PAN M 360 singled out the delicacy of Tilbury's touch.

Published by Matchless Recordings as MRDVD 01, a region-free DVD-Video with uncompressed 24-bit stereo audio, recorded and mixed by Sebastian Lexer, with notes by Skempton, Morgan and David Ryan.