NCC, Crash Ensemble/Pierson

IMMA

Feldman

– Rothko Chapel.

Beckett/Feldman

– Words and Music.

Morton Feldman has had a good decade at the start of the 21st century in Ireland. He featured in one of the RTÉ Living Music Festivals. His six-hour long Second String Quartet was played as part of the Beckett Centenary Festival of 2006. And this year there have been important performances given in conjuction with Imma's ongoing exhibition Vertical Thoughts, Morton Feldman and the Visual Arts.

Sunday's programme in the Great Hall of Imma presented just two pieces. Rothko Chapel(1971) is a tribute to the painter Mark Rothko, written to be performed at the Menil Foundation's devotional room in Houston, where 14 Rothko paintings hang. Words and Musicdates from 1987, the last year of Feldman's life, when he was commissioned to write new music for Samuel Beckett's 1961 radio play.

Rothko Chapelis scored for double choir, viola, percussion and celesta, the wordless voices creating sounds that hang in the air like clouds, with distant rumbles and tentative lines from the instruments, culminating in a fully-blown viola melody that the composer wrote at the age of 15. Sunday's performance conducted by Alan Pierson was strongest in the controlled calm of the choral singing.

Talking about Words and Music, Feldman described Beckett as "a word man, a fantastic word man. And I always felt that I was a note man. And I think that's what brought me to him. The kind of shared longing that he has, this saturated, unending longing." The two characters in Words and Musicare really three if you count the music, all hypnotically gripped in a Beckettian grind, Barry McGovern's Joe (Words), always subservient but aspiring to melody, Owen Roe's Croak domineering through the deafening clouts of his club, and Music (invoked as Bob), at once calm and unsettled, and independent, almost, but not quite.

Feldman’s achievement was to inhabit Beckett’s world as uncomfortably and as fully as any Beckett character, and to have been able to do so without interfering with the musical depth of Beckett’s prosody. The achievement of Sunday’s performance was that the speaking voices and instrumentalists of the small ensemble were each as fully musical as the other.