…It also courts seriousness and solemnity. Both figure highly in a recording of the composer Morton Feldman’s Triadic Memories, written in 1981 and reconfigured for a new release in recent months on the Belgian label Sub Rosa. Played by Jean-Luc Fafchamps, the solo piano in Feldman’s soft, spare, suggestive piece sounds almost like it’s talking to itself about the roles of patience and perseverance within its own chosen cloistered existence.
Its soundings also serve as a replacement for an earlier issue of the same piece by the same pianist, released in 1990, that was made according to an early draft version of the score that was subsequently corrected a few years later. The revised score, Fafchamps writes in the liner notes, featured a “tiny notation detail” that had “tremendous consequences on the form of the composition” and he could no longer live with the earlier recording. “I was mortified,” he confesses. So Fafchamps returned to Triadic Memories to do it again, on the same piano with the same recording engineer and the same basic approach to Feldman’s aesthetic that he had employed a decade earlier…
Andy Battaglia, March 2nd, 2012