American composer Morton Feldman (1926–1987) spent the 1950s carving out a language that has remained singular ever since: open, quasi‑functional sonorities placed with extreme care, drifting in a quiet, meditative flow rather than obeying traditional forms. His pieces are typically slow, calm and often very long, built from sound events that hover in the finest piano and pianissimo shades. In this music, time is stretched; structure is something you sense rather than count, as tones appear and disappear like thoughts in a barely lit room.

Complete Works for Multiple Piano focuses on the strand of Feldman’s output written for more than two hands at the keyboard, presenting for the first time all his piano works for three or more players. Recorded at Westdeutscher Rundfunk in Cologne between 2013 and 2015, the project is anchored by the duo elaeis – Jovita Zähl and Philipp Kronbichler – who invite additional pianists and singers, including Sarah Becker and Claudia Boettcher, to realise these delicate scores. The set reveals how multiplying the instrument extends Feldman’s language: overlapping attacks and decays create a web of resonance in which individual lines are less important than the overall, softly glowing field they generate together.

Several pieces are documented here in premiere recordings. Pianos and Voices is heard for the first time on five grand pianos with five sopranos, an ensemble that literalises Feldman’s fascination with proximity and blend. Chords are placed with almost ritual slowness, vocal tones sliding into and out of the piano’s after‑ring so that boundaries between keys and breath become porous. Equally striking is the recently discovered Trio for Two Pianos and Cello, with Rohan de Saram – long‑time member of the Arditti Quartet – on violoncello. The bowed instrument introduces a different kind of sustain and grain into Feldman’s world, its fragile line threading through the pianos’ sparse chords like a hairline crack in glass.

One of the box set’s quiet achievements is to rebalance our view of Feldman’s trajectory. The monumental late works have sometimes overshadowed his earlier pieces, encouraging a narrative in which the shorter, less familiar scores appear as mere prelude. Heard together, the multiple‑piano works argue otherwise. They show a composer consistently preoccupied with touch, colour and duration, already testing how far he can strip away conventional development while still holding the listener in a state of heightened attention. Early and later pieces sit side by side and illuminate one another: the seeds of the long, evening‑length scores are audible in the concise, finely judged experiments that precede them.

The performances themselves treat quietness and restraint as disciplines rather than effects. Zähl, Kronbichler, Becker, Boettcher and their colleagues play with an ear for the smallest inflection: how much weight a single key can bear, how long a chord can resonate before the next one arrives, how pedalling can blur or clarify the space. The recording aesthetic keeps the perspective intimate, close enough to register felt and wood, but spacious enough for Feldman’s characteristic halos of resonance to bloom.

Produced by Westdeutscher Rundfunk Köln and released under exclusive licence from WDR mediagroup GmbH with the support of Kunststiftung NRW, Morton Feldman: Complete Works for Multiple Piano appears in the year of the composer’s centenary as both homage and revelation. It honours a figure whose late reputation can make him seem austere by showing the warmth, variety and quiet curiosity in a specific corner of his catalogue. Above all, it offers three hours in which to experience Feldman’s central insight: that when several people share a single instrument at the edge of audibility, music becomes less a sequence of events than a shared state of listening.