A few months before he died, Morton Feldman told a radio interviewer that he considered Samuel Beckett to be “a word man, a fantastic word man” and that he, Feldman, always thought of himself as a note man. The two worked together twice, first on an opera and then, in 1987, on Words and Music, an absurdist radio play that Beckett repurposed with Feldman’s music. Their mutual sympathy was apparent in Sheffield Chamber Music festival’s affectionate staging of the latter, which occupied this concert’s second half.
Before that, however, the juxtaposition of a minimalist Beckett monologue with one of Feldman’s classic uncoordinated scores laid bare their deep artistic synergy. Rockaby, a desolate exploration of ageing and isolation, was the opener. Directed in the round by Vicky Featherstone, the rigid protagonist – a magnetic Siobhán McSweeney – revolved in her rocking chair, listening and occasionally responding to her own recorded voice. It was hard not to sense the heavy hand of dementia behind the singsong fragments and the fading woman’s desperate final quest for human connection.
Where Beckett’s speech rhythms were tightly bound to the metronomic rocking of McSweeney’s chair, in Feldman’s Why Patterns?, flautist Clare Wickes, Tim Horton on piano and Lewis Blee on glockenspiel crafted independent patterns in ever-changing time signatures. Roaming independently, their response to each other’s rhythmic permutations was both timbral and durational. While Wickes stirred the acoustic pot by switching to mellow alto or sonorous bass flute, Blee conjured iridescent variations through the simultaneous use of up to four sticks. The result was hypnotic, and pure Feldman.
Ultimately, though, the play was the thing. McSweeney was Joe, a words man, in a love-hate relationship with Bob, embodied by conductor George Morton and seven musicians in T-shirts emblazoned with the word “music”. Their tyrannical master Croak appeared, a shuffling Jonjo O’Neill in fur-lined mantle and PJs, demanding they explore chosen themes such as love and age to anarchically comedic effect. Alas, rekindled memories of past sexual encounters proved too much for him and he departed, leaving Joe speechless and the musicians free to break out into unexpected harmony, or at least a Feldman-esque approximation of such.