Rothko Chapel, Kim Kashkashian, Sarah Rothenburg et al (ECM)This record is unlikely to make the Sunday morning playlist to accompany the all-too-brief long lie down with the paper, the racing prospects and possibly the crossword. While I would never draw the line at serious 'art music' for such an occasion, the most often chosen records for that include Wagenseil's Quartets for low strings and the Krumpholtz Concerto for Harp, no.6 if you must know, which would be the theme tune for the Sunday morning programme of gorgeous, uplifting music if ever this website extended into a radio station.
Mark Rothko's paintings omitted the human figure at an early stage of his career and anything identifiably figurative soon after. His canvasses of merging blocks of colour then drained themselves of bright colours to dark until only black remained and then he committed suicide. In a varied shortlist of favourite painters, he is one of mine alongside Vermeer, the Brueghels, de Hooch and, of course, Maggi Hambling. The title piece of this new record is Morton Feldman's music to go with the last, black masterpieces collected in the Rothko Chapel in Houston. It's unlikely you'll be able to name very many other pieces scored for viola, celeste, percussion, soprano, mezzo-soprano and choir.
It's an impossible job, really, to find music to accompany paintings that are best left to shimmer on the edge of eternity in silence but Kim Kashkashian's and Feldman's solemn viola and its small entourage make a brave effort while always somehow doomed to fail by even allowing the possibility of any programmatic interpretation. If music has the advantage of poetry by not having to tie itself to the meanings inevitably let in by words then painting is free of the ideas that come with music. The pieces for voices by John Cage that follow perhaps get closer to Rothko, their sustained single notes overlapping into meditations that float beyond meaning, gently and then more urgently, but offering no more than that. They suggest timelessness without being able to achieve it in their five or six minute duration but they weren't specifically written to go with the art. Such music was possibly of its time and comes with the feel of the dead end of modernism but a cul-de-sac can be worth exploring and the ear for EAR (Antiphonies), thus titled and not just typing that has been left unchecked by me, echo medieval plainchant to show that not all the avant garde threw away all reference to their inheritance.
The highlights of the disc, though, must be the Erk Satie Gnossiennes, more so than the dramatic but deliberately simplistic Ogives. Gnossienne no.1 is made to linger and hang even more than I remember it doing. It wanders in its misty mystery, emerging with its simple but haunting refrain. Sarah Rothenburg brings out all that was already implied in it and the disc is worth having for this alone, bringing back memories of a much-loved LP I played over and again as a teenager. I hope it is exactly that recording, by John McCabe, that I have gone to the lengths of finding on CD only to save me the trouble of finding out if, firstly, the LP is still in good enough condition to play and, secondly, my never-used turntable can play it. I had unwontedly left Erik Sate aside for much too long.
But, there's more, the set finishes with John Cage's In a Landscape. Whereas the voice pieces here are from the 1980's, and thus 'late', this is from 1948 when he was 36, and apparently a different composer altogether. It is like finding Picasso's blue or rose periods when all you knew was the Demoiselles d'Avignon or some other fractured vision of humanity. It is luminous, repetitively so, but lands very much on the lucky side of whether such compositions sound trite and self-generating or somehow entirely convincing. It can be a close run thing. It's not unlike Philip Glass's wonderful Solo Piano album. I wonder if that still sounds as good as it used to.
Oh, no, here we go again.