MUSIC REVIEW : Morton Feldman Work Premieres at CalArts Fest

Every festival, in the process of history and growth, goes through alternating periods of expansion and consolidation, years of reaching out and years of holding tight. For the 13th CalArts Contemporary Music Festival, which opened Friday night in Modular Theater at the Valencia campus, 1989 looks like a time of stasis.

In beginning the three-day event with the West Coast premiere performance of Morton Feldman’s final work, “For Samuel Beckett,” the CalArts forces may have commited an act of inspired stasis. “For Samuel Beckett” mystifies as often as it intrigues. It demands close attention, but its rewards are fleeting; its rhetoric seems articulate, but its messages are not clear-cut.

And the program-makers did not balance their agenda. The 50-minute piece, which received an intense reading by an ensemble of 23 instrumentalists--the New CalArts Twentieth Century Players, conducted by Bunita Marcus--should have preceded another work of comparable fascination, or perhaps a selection of short musical morsels offered in contrast.

As it was, there was something anti-festive about this half-program, which appeared to have been left incomplete.

At least Marcus & Company gave the low-keyed, subtly changing, non-noisy Feldman work its due in concentration and internal coloration. It moves steadily and slowly through myriad shifts in timbre and harmonic configuration, altering its direction (never its lack of speed) in small ways, like a snail patiently, gently veering to one side as it proceeds toward an unspecified goal.

The opening minutes are a time of adjustment for the listener--minutes in which one begins to focus on instrumental relationships and the inner life of inside voices. Temporal values emerge and rise to consciousness and one seems to move with tiny but unmeasured steps across a plain of small events. At the quiet ending, after the lengthy middle, that colorless horizon has come to seem inevitable.