Richard Fairman
Financial Times
May 2016

American artists such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko are familiar names. Their closest counterparts among composers—Morton Feldman and George Crumb—remain on the fringes, though their musical canvases aspire to a similarly abstract style.

A selection of the pair’s works for piano offers music of the utmost simplicity.

Crumb’s A Little Suite for Christmas imagines bells and carols in a child’s dream. Feldman’s Palais de Mari weaves a spare tapestry of isolated notes.

Played with extreme sensitivity by Steven Osborne, this is a disc for late-night listening—silence, peace, reverie.