The Ives Ensemble’s final performance

The Ives Ensemble is saying goodbye. After forty years, countless premieres, and, of course, a wealth of music by Charles Ives, the journey comes to an end. Fittingly, the farewell takes place at the Muziekgebouw, where the Ives Ensemble has been a regular guest since the venue’s opening in 2005. It is a farewell true to their style: not with bells and whistles, but with the breathtaking Trio by one of the composers the group has tirelessly championed for decades: the experimental sound-wizard Morton Feldman.  
 
The concert is part of a Feldman Special at the Muziekgebouw, celebrating what would have been the composer’s 100th birthday. The Trio for violin, cello and piano marks the beginning of Feldman’s final creative phase and his experiments of extremely long duration. At two hours, the Trio is a relatively ‘short’ work from this period – in 2019, also at the Muziekgebouw, the Ives Ensemble performed the nearly six-hour Second String Quartet. Using minimal means and rarely exceeding the volume of pianissimo, Feldman creates an extraordinary, intoxicating sound world. The Ives Ensemble’s 1996 recording of the piece was re-released in 2018; Luister Magazine hailed it as ‘a little gem’.