Reviews

When I wrote about Felder's flute concerto Inner Sky (1994, rev. 1999) in a concert review of Tanglewood's 2011 Festival of Contemporary Music, I mentioned how much I looked forward to hearing the piece again on its (then in preparation) recording.

David Felder's works are fairly intense, and the multichannel mix allowed by the Blu-Ray disc (Albany 1418) helps this. Tweener takes its time emerging. Spurts of low brass, a spattering of marimba and piano, a single flute...

There is much variety in Felder's music, as well as originality; one might not think these five pieces came from the same composer, yet one would certainly have a hard time putting another's name to them...

This CD of orchestral works was recorded during the 2000 June in Buffalo Festival. Both composers whose works are represented on this recording have a long history and close ties to the festival...

The American Composer David Felder (b.1953) is, sadly, neither well known nor widely performed in Europe, despite the fact that some of his...

David Felder (1953) is currently one of the leading independent and most uncompromising American composers of his generation. Presently Professor and...

The music of the American composer David Felder projects itself to the future with deep roots in the tradition in a spiral of sounds which surround the listener...

This disc features two, significant, multi-movement works, as well as a violin solo, by composer David Felder. The first piece, Jeu de Tarot, is scored for violin soloist, eleven performers, and electronics. The second piece, Netivot, is for string quartet and electronics. The presence of virtuoso...

From the very outset, it strikes as music on fire. The Prelude begins with a recorded track of the narrated poem, quickly overtaken by music that is clearly based on gestures taken from the overtone series. The next movement (using the same text) builds to an enormous climax of overlapping, slowly ascending lines. It’s as though a great space is being opened up for exploration.

David Felder has taught for a number of years at SUNY Buffalo, running the June in Buffalo Festival and mentoring countless contemporary composers in the school’s illustrious graduate program. His own works are multi-faceted, incorporating...

[Felder's] vocal writing is ambitious, operatic in scope and compass. The piece opens with a series of spectral chords, over which Aiken’s voice soars, effortlessly managing pianissimo dynamics and altissimo high notes.

The vocal-orchestral-electronic mix has a glorious complexity and an ambitious foregrounding one hears less frequently nowadays but is no less the welcome for its rarity. The combination of the various iterations of the poetry combined with the highly voluble syntactical whole of words and sound-color lucidity-abundance makes for exceptional listening.

In his program notes for this CD, Tim Rutherford-Johnson describes David Felder’s recent works as “music to be heard in the first person (I am experiencing this), not in the third (they are playing that).” I suspect this is actually true of most music; but in any case, especially...

This is fascinating. David Felder wrote Jeu de Tarot, a chamber violin concerto, for Irvine Arditti and Ensemble LINEA in 2017. Interestingly, Felder takes his tarot card...

The pairing of David Felder and Andrew Rindfleisch on a record is not a particularly unlikely one. The liner notes declare that their work "couldn't be more different in...

David Felder's music may be somewhat difficult to categorize for the average listener. Electronics are an important component, not simply as an enhancement to human players in an orchestra, but as an additional instrument: a concerto for electronics and orchestra. This idea...

The entire first page of the booklet of the present CD is given over to an explanation as to why there are two discs with overlapping (albeit not completely identical) content included in this new Albany release. It turns out that one of them is a Blu-Ray disc with 90 minutes of music (no video) devoted...

Inner Sky is an immersive listening experience. It's also a highly sophisticated colloquy between soloist, ensemble, and electronics; one that achieves a carefully...

How broad a swath do these two discs cover? Certainly, even though all of this music except for BoxMan comes from the 21st century (and even BoxMan is heard with 21st-century revisions), the selection is broad enough...

This intriguing disc presents a generous programme of four orchestral works, each clocking in at around 20 minutes, by a pair of decidedly contrasting voices. The performances stem from the June concerts at the State University of New York at Buffalo where Morton Feldman...

I find I am growing ever fonder of David Felder's music. I first encountered it by accident when I bought the recently-reviewed recording of Morton Feldman's...

I think I've said this before: Morton Feldman's The Viola in My Life has got to be one of the all-time best titles for an opus. I was happy to get the EMF disc; it ably rounds out the first three parts of The Viola in My Life (CRI 620). Parts I, II and III are scored for intimate-sized ensembles, whereas Part IV is for viola...

June in Buffalo is a festival of exploration and activity where fans of contemporary music may satisfy their desires for good performances of same. Morton Feldman is a known quantity. He used to be the focal point of the festival — today David Felder runs it. It has been going...

Morton Feldman's music demands deep listening; the four hours on the edge of silence of his For Philip Guston do not reveal their secrets the first time around. His series of four pieces collectively titled The Viola in My Life provides a more accessible entrée; I would call the last of these - at hand on a new...

David Felder is a faculty member at SUNY Buffalo and longtime director of the June in Buffalo festival. On this fine CD, the composer draws inspiration for his work from the poety of Pableo Neruda and writings of Friedrich Nietzsche...

Coleccion Nocturna (1983) is the earliest of Felder's Neruda pieces recorded to date (there are many others, according to the notes, but most have yet to be issued on CD). It is a set of five "variations" on what Felder calls, "a wholly self-contained musical object" from man older piano work called...

Editor's Choice for September, 2000

David Felder gets a chance to show what he can do with orchestra in this brilliant recording and the results are amazing. These brilliant compositions...

Here in Denmark, the possibilities to find new American music on CD are surprisingly poor. Is it because sales and export over there are more commonly done over the...

Readers of City will recall that David Felder is the director of the June in Buffalo contemporary music festival. As if that didn't put him solidly enough on the side of the angels, Felder's own music is wonderfully accomplished stuff...

One of the most ambitious programs of the season was that heard at a Group for Contemporary Music concert last week. It consisted of four very demanding- and rewarding- string quartets by Jonathon Harvey, Wayne Peterson, David Felder, and Stefan Wolpe [...] The four works were very different from one another; in idiom, technically, emotionally...

Felder's brief Linebacker Music was linked with Stravinsky's Rite in that they both evoke feelings of ferocity, even savagery: and on the technical level, they are built not so much on the idea of themes as onelemental motifs and recurring rhythmic phrases that can be so compelling as to have the memorability of full-fledged themes.

The principal concert, given by the Buffalo Philharmonic at the end of the week , was devoted to just two twenty-minute pieces-Mr. Felder's percussion concerto Between and Mr. Wuorinen's "Bamboula Squared". It was good to be able to hear...

A far greater inventiveness and even a true personal expression characterized the American, David Felder's music. His Six Poems...is difficult to describe: melodic, but not...

Felder's Between is a riveting score [...] There's some gorgeous orchestral writing here - the use of percussion and soloist Steve Schick's virtuosity being the pervasive...

Felder's Three Pieces for Orchestra is loosely based upon episodes from the composer's experience. The outer movements are dense yet form a purposeful continuum that clearly is going somewhere...

Chilean poet Pablo Neruda's verse (Six Poems from Neruda's "Alturas...") is a disturbing view of many social issues and humankind's continual struggle to cope. Felder, while not attempting literal portrayals, does capture...

Felder's Third Face alternates between a muscular, interlocking quartet of instrumental jeremiads, and more delicate alignments in whispering harmonics. It's a tense, hard-fisted work, extravagant in its rhetoric, full of howls and leering virtuoso licks.

David Felder's Canzone XXXI stood in marked contrast even though from common roots (3 previous Venetian canzoni). Based on Dante's grief-laden Canzone on the death of Beatrice, Felder's piece is tightly written, muted at...

Rocket Summer, a solo piano work slightly more difficult in approachability than the remainder of the concert, was full of close-knit, furiously accelerating and crescendoing interwoven trills and repeated notes, very...

Another Face could easily have sunk into mere sound effects, a boring and ultimately meaningless exploration of all the sounds a solo violin can make...

In November Sky the flute is commanded to go forth and multiply, the flute's basic gestures cataloged and isolated, and then made to grow, shrink, tighten and expand. The soloist on stage in this...

BoxMan was the artistic high point of the festival (Ars Electronica, 1987, Linz Austria) as a whole. The evolution of such an impressive work happened in two ways: the composition by David Felder, which used elements of jazz and the soundscapes of new music was phenomenally interpreted...

Third Face, by David Felder, a composer on the faculty, was brief--ten minutes--and eventful. I have not heard much Felder music, but what I have heard...

David Felder's Journal was, to this listener, the most effective of the three commissioned works [...]. The work didn't sound very lyrical at the outset, but during the course of ten...

Elegance has a place of its own. A piece was played which would be most interesting to hear again in thirty years when it is time...

Even more fun came when trombonist Anderson sat flanked by loud speakers and nested within the wires and pedals of David Felder's 'mini-opera,' BoxMan. The richly...

Charm is not the word that springs immediately to mind when contemplating the powerful visions of David Felder's Crossfire. Karen Bentley's elegant and powerful...

Felder was conductor in his Coleccion Nocturna after a poem by the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda in which the composer felt 'powerfully evocative images of a surreal...

Earlier in the same adventurous program (1989 Huddersfield), was David Felder's Crossfire described as 'a music and video virtuoso performance project for solo...

Felder's Three Lines from Twenty Poems was excellently crafted and very communicative, opening with quietly descending orchestral sighs in bitonal language...

BoxMan was as constricting in its psychological context as it was expansive in its technical complexity. Trombonist Miles Anderson put his horn through a variety of...

The most technologically advanced undertaking of the festival was Inner Sky, complex and geogeously scored.

Mr. Felder's powerful Coleccion Nocturna, a 1983 work for piano and clarinet was the polar opposite of the Feldman. Extroverted and kinetic, sometimes harmonically spiky...

Testifying to the high regard with which American composer David Felder (b. 1953) is held is the calibre of personnel featured on these releases. Heather Buck and Ethan Herschenfeld are the vocal soloists on Les Quatre Temps Cardinaux, and violinist...

Testifying to the high regard with which American composer David Felder (b. 1953) is held is the calibre of personnel featured on these releases. Heather Buck and Ethan Herschenfeld are the vocal soloists on Les Quatre Temps Cardinaux, and violinist Irvine Arditti and the Arditti Quartet appear on Jeu de Tarot; both...

The Boston Modern Orchestra Project and conductor Gil Rose bring their customary level of care and commitment to this stunning, fifty-minute realization of material by American composer David Felder (b. 1953)...

There are a few works that announce their stature in their opening bars, such as Beethoven’s Third and Fifth Symphonies, or Haydn’s “Lord Nelson” Mass. After a brief, mumbled introduction (an actor reading poet René Daumal’s words), David Felder’s Les quatre temps cardinaux (“The Four Cardinal Times”: dawn/spring, noon/summer, sunset/fall, night/winter) becomes one of them.

The latest release by Gil Rose's Boston Modern Orchestra Project is a work they had performed a few seasons back in Boston, David Felder's Les Quatres Temps...

The poems [in Felder's Les Quatre Temps Cardinaux] are heard not only in the spiky, emotionally intense vocal writing, but spoken on the recorded...

Some of the most high-octane music of the afternoon, though, came in David Felder's Stuck-stücke for String Quartet. Exploding out of the gate...

Of the three works on Sunday's program, David Felder's Les Quatre Temps Cardinaux took best advantage of the surround-sound stereo set-up in the hall. […] Throughout, the blend of electronic and acoustic sounds...

David Felder's Les Quatre Temps Cardinaux of 2013 was the symphonic-length conclusion to Sunday's program. It's a fiercely ambitious work, employing soprano and bass soloists (here, Laura Aikin and Ethan Herschenfeld), and weaving together...

All the pieces in Sunday's concert […] might have inspired the title 'Surround Sound,' but it was the Felder work that made it literally true, bouncing electronic sounds and samples around an array of speakers located throughout the auditorium.

David Felder's Inner Sky [is] a bracing, ravishing soundscape for flutes (Marie Tachouet), electronics, and ensemble (led by Fellow Robert Treviño)

David Felder's electronic sounds magnified the already eerie orchestral scoring in Inner Sky (1994-99), though the main focus...

David Felder's affecting Coleccion Nocturna took its title from a Pablo Neruda poem, and presumably its shadowy, searching mood as well. The poem itself describes "a hard intonation of darkness," which Mr. Felder ably transcribed for clarinet...

Morton Feldman(1926-1987) wrote his Instruments II the same year he founded June in Buffalo, a festival for emerging young composers at the music department of the State University of New York at...

David Felder and Morton Feldman would be neighbors in a music dictionary, but they were also friends in real life; teaching at SUNY, Buffalo, and intimately involved...

The long running June in Buffalo summer festival has seen two directors over its 25-year history. This disc contains music for orchestra and chamber orchestra (with and without soloists) composed by both these individuals, Morton Feldman and David Felder...