Eliza McCarthy, Juliet Fraser and Apartment House play three decades of Feldman at LSO St Luke's on Saturday 19 September 2026 at 5pm, ending with Triadic Memories.
Morton Feldman was born in New York in 1926 and died in Buffalo in 1987, and he wrote the quietest music of the twentieth century. He studied with Wallingford Riegger and Stefan Wolpe, fell in with John Cage in the 1950s, and took more from the abstract expressionist painters he drank with than from any composer: for a decade he wrote in graphic notation, drawing a line for the length of a note and a number for how many to play, leaving pitch to the performer. He went back to conventional staves later and kept the hush.
The programme spans three decades of that. Projection 2, from 1951, is one of the graphic scores, so no two performances of it are the same. Three Voices sets a soprano against two tapes of herself. Triadic Memories closes the evening: ninety minutes of solo piano in which patterns almost repeat and never quite do.
Eliza McCarthy, one of the leading interpreters of new piano music in Britain, plays with the soprano Juliet Fraser and the ensemble Apartment House at LSO St Luke’s on Saturday 19 September 2026, beginning at five in the afternoon. The early start is the right one: this is music that needs an audience that has not yet had dinner and is not yet tired. Apartment House have been playing this repertoire in Britain for thirty years.