Morton Feldman: Piano and String Quartet / Aki Takahashi, Kronos Quartet
Written two years before his death in 1987, Morton Feldman's Piano and  String Quartet is a shimmering, pristine musical event. Contrasting Aki  Takahashi's widely-spaced piano arpeggios with Kronos Quartet's extended chords,  Feldman allows lingering sounds from either the piano or the strings to haze  over many of the piece's near-silences. Kronos plays their parts with tremulous  fragility, often making pointedly clear the viola's musical valley between the  leading violins and the trailing cello. By the time Feldman composed this piece,  he was deeply committed to extended works--chamber pieces that could telescope  motifs and worry their tonality so that it warbled between hauntingly atonal and  familiarly tonal singing. This is a powerful, evening piece, one that can set an  extravagantly crystalline musical mood.--Andrew Bartlett