Hugh Tinney (piano)

Imma, Dublin

Feldman

– Triadic Memories.

There's no denying the fact that Morton Feldman is a divisive composer. The simplest description of his Triadic Memoriesfor piano, written in 1981, six years before the composer's death at the age of 61, tells you why. The piece is so long, slow and soft that there are listeners who will simply not be able to endure it.

Hugh Tinney's performance on Saturday, given in conjunction with the Imma exhibition, Vertical Thoughts, Morton Feldman and the Visual Arts, was at once lulling and disorienting, as the composer would have wanted it to be.

Triadic Memorieshas the suggestion of traditional narrative, but actually does nothing either to sustain or develop it. It simply floats and morphs, the pianist patiently working through crepuscular patterns that blur one's sense of time and motion.

Think of the childhood experience of staring at a fingernail or your face in a mirror until they became strange, almost alien-looking, and you’ll have an idea what the repetitions of Feldman’s softly-cushioned sound world can achieve.

Saturday’s performance was wonderful in its control of tone colour and in the patience with which Tinney allowed the music to unfold. The exercise is as fascinating as alchemy, and potentially as dubious. But, however obvious it may seem to say so, Feldman chose his musical gestures extraordinarily well, and, with Tinney as his committed advocate, created a drifting, hypnotic soundscape that transformed the potentially mundane into a kind of slow, irresistible vortex – or should that be anti-vortex? Yes. There were a number of defections from the audience. But the response at the end was hearty and rousing, the sharp edges and volume of the applause coming as a real shock after the sheer quietness of the music.