Mivos Quartet with Vicky Chow: Morton Feldman 100

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Morton Feldman, who was associated with the New York School alongside John Cage, Earle Brown, and Christian Wolff. 

Within this musical environment, his ideas were also profoundly shaped by his close ties to abstract expressionist painters Mark Rothko, Philip Guston, and Jackson Pollock. 

His Piano and String Quartet was commissioned by the Kronos Quartet and premiered at the New Music America Festival in Los Angeles in 1985, with Aki Takahashi on piano. 

It is a rarely performed piece, which composer Steve Reich commented on after listening to Feldman’s later works following his death: “(The Piano and String Quartet) is the most beautiful work of his that I know ... I wanted to call him to tell him that I had missed the boat with his late pieces, to ask how he made them—but that was no longer possible.”