The Strad Recommends: Antoine Tamestit: Feldman

THE STRAD RECOMMENDS

The Strad Issue: December 2025

Description: Focus and humanity combine in a Feldman classic

Musicians: Antoine Tamestit (viola) Paulo Álvares (piano) Gürzenich Orchestra Cologne/Harry Ogg, François-Xavier Roth

Works: Feldman: The Viola in My Life I–IV]

Catalogue number: HARMONIA MUNDI HMM905328

A touching, quietly profound personal note from Antoine Tamestit prefaces his luminous account of these iconic viola works, in which he explains how Morton Feldman’s quartet of The Viola in My Life pieces have influenced his perspective on his instrument and its capabilities, and its central role in his own life. This sense of connection and belief is more than evident in Tamestit’s deeply considered, microscopically controlled yet fresh playing, in which even the simplest crescendo – explored at length in The Viola in My Life I, for example – can take on whole worlds of meaning.

There’s no doubt a temptation to approach the often isolated sounds, the all-pervasive quiet and the gnomic semi-repetitions of Feldman’s four pieces with a cool objectivity, but Tamestit’s accounts are warm, deeply characterful and sometimes surprisingly assertive: he dovetails his sound beautifully with contributions from the Gürzenich Orchestra players in nos.II and III, for example, and delivers Feldman’s rare moments of faster-moving fragmentary melody with an almost folk-like sense of rhapsody.

Tamestit receives focused, precise support from the Gürzenich musicians, most tellingly in the richly scored The Viola in My Life IV, whose climax (with conductor François-Xavier Roth) feels almost Mahlerian. It’s an achingly beautiful and deeply human disc that revels in Tamestit’s minute insights, yet never loses sight of Feldman’s profound sense of emotion in these works, however restrained it might be. Recorded sound is appropriately close and convincing.

DAVID KETTLE