The Sunday Listen: 'Palais De Mari' by Morton Feldman, as performed by Igor Levit
This week’s delicately dissonant Sunday Listen is well, ok, some of you will have to go with me on this…
At a time when the concert halls of the world were shuttered and silent due to Covid, Pianist, Igor Levit ingeniously gave hauskonzerts from his home in Berlin, broadcast live on Twitter every day. He streamed more than 50 concerts, performing on a 1920s Steinway B that had once belonged to the Swiss pianist Edwin Fischer. He dressed casually and gave a brief introduction to each performance in German and English – no need for the formality and etiquette of the Wigmore Hall here. He played Bach and Schubert, Beethoven and - most unexpectedly of all, a piece by the composer Morton Feldman: ‘Palais De Mari’.
Characteristic of much of Morton’s incredibly sparse piano work, ‘Palais de Mari’ is without any discernible ‘tune’ or melodic structure. It is ambling, sometimes patience-wearing 28-minute meditation of delicate minimalist textures, spacious pauses and inconclusive chords that works in a similar way as Bill Evans’ ‘Peace Piece’, a track I’ve shared and played with many of you. The piece is an open door into darkness: we stand at the threshold and peer in, then start to pass through the doorway and start the journey, having no idea where we’re going or where we’ll wind up.
‘Mari’ is not an easy listen – it demands an act of faith from the listener and the pianist. It is a piece tinged with the uncertainty of looking inward, searching for some sort of order or plan, occasionally encountering something that feels like the presence of an organising intelligence, but mostly being left with the overwhelming feeling that all there is and will be is meaningless space – no message, no content, just the sound of you or in a room, alone, listening.
Something about the recording of this piece, specifically by Levit and the extremely challenging global context in which in which it was recorded, struck an immense chord with me. Levit conjured a world where Feldman’s music fit in, rather than being a respite, an interior world of loneliness, exhaustion, brooding anxiety, lack of routine, and a quiet, gradually unfolding openness to the unknown. Incredible, really, that a bunch of floating, near silent musical phrases, suspended in time, with little to no structure, seemed, somehow, to speak so surely to our collective lives and livelihoods. Silence, truly, speaks volumes.
If you want to listen to a full recording of ‘Palais De Mari’, you can find a version on Levit’s album ‘Encounter’.
Have a lovely Sunday!