Right attitude is key to 4 1/2 hours of 'Guston'

It is necessary to make a pact with oneself to approach the late American composer Morton Feldman's "For Philip Guston" with the generous spirit it deserves and rewards.

This nearly 4 1/2-hour piece for keyboards, flutes and mallet instruments, always played without intermission, received a rare performance at the Simons Center Recital Hall Tuesday night as part of the Spoleto Festival's "Music in Time" series, which might as well have been temporarily renamed the "Music in Lots of Time" series.

It all depends on what one is expecting, of course. If we sign on to fly to Argentina or Australia, we are well aware that we will be squashed into an airplane for a very long time and will adjust ourselves to the experience, one way or another.

If, however, we are planning to take a quick jaunt down to Miami or up to Washington, and the trip takes 10 or more hours, it is likely that we will arrive in the vilest of moods.

And so with "For Philip Guston," a work Feldman wrote shortly before he died and dedicated to the memory of his friend, an acclaimed visual artist, it is necessary to settle in, calm down, get comfortable and acknowledge from the start that you will not be going anywhere for quite a while.

Nor does the music change very much over its 260 minutes: Feldman's score is mostly soft, slow and modular, little bursts of sound against an ever-present backdrop of silence, in a gentle ritual procession.

For some, the results will be as fascinating and hypnotic, as following along while clouds chase each other across an autumn sky; for others, it will be about as interesting as watching paint dry.

I loved what I heard on Tuesday — and have been much taken by a complete recording of "For Philip Guston," featuring the California E.A.R. Unit — but I could not make it through the whole performance, due to other commitments around Charleston.

Friends who have made it through an entire performance speak of the experience in rapturous terms; for them it was a little like finishing "War and Peace," "Gravity's Rainbow" and the uncut version of "Fanny and Alexander," all at once.

Feldman (1926-1987) was an idiosyncratic and highly original creator. He is one of the very few modern American composers I can think of whose music is probably performed more often today than it was he when he was alive (Virgil Thomson and Samuel Barber are two others of whom this may be said, but where, these days, are William Schuman, Wallingford Riegger, Roger Sessions or even Spoleto's very own Gian Carlo Menotti?).

As critic Alan Rich once put it, Feldman wrote "music of an outward immobility and inward irresistible propulsion, random yet purposeful, its construction intricate and precise."

"For Philip Guston" might be likened to an extended musical meditation, in which sounds of ever deepening beauty immerse and surround the listener. After a while, the very atmosphere seems charged.

The performances, by Lydia Brown on piano and celesta, Margaret Lancaster on flutes and piccolo and David Tolen on glockenspiel, vibraphone, marimba and chimes, were deft and unfailingly poetic, a mixture of Olympian calm and fierce concentration.

My interest in the piece grew consistently, and when I left it was with profound reluctance. My timing was perfect, however, as I re-entered the so-called "real world" just as bells were sounding all over Charleston and I felt as though I were taking Feldman's music with me.

Another musical interlude

A little bit later on Tuesday night, at Gaillard Municipal Auditorium, Joseph Flummerfelt led the Westminster Choir, the Charleston Symphony Orchestra Chorus and the Spoleto Festival USA Orchestra in a program of relatively unfamiliar works by some of the most famous composers in the world, Franz Joseph Haydn, Johannes Brahms and Ludwig van Beethoven.

The latter of Haydn's two settings of the "Te Deum" began the evening on a jubilant note. It is wonderful music — steady, energetic, absolutely without neurosis — and the chorus and orchestra boomed out as though they had been just waiting for the opportunity to arise.

"Nanie," a setting of a poem by Friedrich Schiller, is among the least performed of Brahms' choral works, and I've never been able to understand why. It is the perfect refutation to the old cliché that music written in a major key is "happy" and music in a minor key is "sad."

"Nanie" is an elegy for young dead, real lump in the throat stuff, and yet it is set in the sunniest B major. The chorus sang out heartily yet never sounded blatant or vulgar, and the rapt opening oboe solo was played with appropriate sweetness.

The program closed with Beethoven's "Mass in C Major" Op. 86, which is not to be confused with the "Missa Solemnis" but remains one of the composer's most significant vocal works.

The soloists were soprano Jennifer Check and mezzo Sandra Piques Eddy (both of whom distinguished themselves in Rossini's "La Cenerentola"), as well as the tenor Raul Melo and the bass-baritone Stephen Morscheck.

Gaillard was as packed as I've seen it, and the audience cheered the program to the rafters. Along with artistic director for chamber music Charles Wadsworth, Flummerfelt is one of the few founding members of the Spoleto Festival USA still in residence, and they deserve our gratitude.