Music For Violin Alone, the second solo foray from seasoned virtuoso Mark Feldman, provides a fresh perspective on the musician's structural concerns. The musicians finesse and technical proficiency is essentially remonstrated, constantly deflected down a series of exuberant, dislocated sound-fields, which redirect archaic forms through a strained avant-garde aesthetic informed as much by necessity as by the urge to dynamite decades of Puritanism. Feldman consistently switches off between figure and ground, tossing themes and countermelodies around mid-phrase, converging on a theme for a certain period of time, and then building outward again through some scrape and purr techniques that burrow into basement tunnels, providing an amber blur.
In his handling of classical, new music, improvisation, and romanticism, Feldman maintains a rigorous attention to form. This much is expected, however, and it's the relationships into which this enters with a high energy spontaneity and gutbucket hues, not to mention an on-again-off-again liaison with the affectation of romanticism, that spells success for this audio-document. The work is full of invigorating passages, and others that grind at one's determinations, but there are others that, without seeming the least bit rote, are directly affecting, and others still that brandish a butter knife-sharp wit. Feldman's craft finds new depths in this uniting of virtuoso and non-musician.
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