Monday Evening Concerts: Morton Feldman's Rothko Chapel

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Some griefs do not want a melody. They want a room that agrees to stay quiet alongside you. Feldman wrote Rothko Chapel the year after his friend Mark Rothko died, for the octagonal Houston chapel where fourteen of Rothko's near-black canvases hang, and the music is built to be as slow and as unresolved as standing in front of them. Then at the very end he lets a viola play a tune he wrote as a teenager, and it arrives like a window opening in a sealed building. ECHOI's soloists perform it under Jan Williams, the percussionist who worked inside Feldman's own circle and is about as close to a direct line back to the composer as still exists. Josquin des Prez motets from the 1490s are threaded between the Feldman pieces, five centuries apart and somehow the same hush. This opens the 87th season of a series that has run here since 1939. 8 PM on Monday October 5, at Zipper Hall inside the Colburn School.