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**FLUX Quartet Tackles Feldman's Six-Hour Masterpiece and Lives to Tell the Tale**

There are musical marathons, and then there's Morton Feldman's String Quartet No. 2 – a six-hour odyssey that makes Wagner's Ring Cycle look like a pop song. When the FLUX Quartet decided to tackle this beast of contemporary classical music, they weren't just committing to an album; they were signing up for what amounts to musical endurance art. The result is a recording that captures one of the 20th century's most audacious compositional experiments with the kind of surgical precision and meditative focus that would make a Zen master weep.

Feldman, the Brooklyn-born maverick who died in 1987, spent his career dismantling everything we thought we knew about time, melody, and musical narrative. By the 1980s, he had become obsessed with duration as a compositional element, creating works that stretched conventional attention spans to their breaking point. String Quartet No. 2, completed in 1983, represents the apex of this philosophy – a work so long that most concert halls can't program it, and so demanding that many quartets won't attempt it. It's the musical equivalent of climbing Everest in your underwear.

The piece emerged from Feldman's fascination with Persian rugs and their intricate, seemingly repetitive patterns that reveal infinite variation upon close inspection. This isn't background music for your dinner party; it's foreground music that demands you rearrange your entire day around it. The composer famously said he wanted to create music that existed in a state between sound and silence, and nowhere is this more evident than in this mammoth work.

FLUX Quartet – violinists Tom Chiu and Conrad Harris, violist Max Mandel, and cellist Felix Fan – approach this Himalayan peak of chamber music with the kind of fearless commitment that separates the wheat from the chaff in contemporary classical performance. Their interpretation doesn't just survive the work's punishing length; it transforms endurance into transcendence.

The opening hour unfolds like watching grass grow in real-time, but grass that happens to be composing poetry. Feldman's signature soft dynamics and glacial pace create a sound world where every note carries the weight of eternity. FLUX navigates these treacherous waters with remarkable ensemble precision, their intonation so pure it borders on the supernatural. When four musicians can maintain this level of focus for six hours, you're witnessing something closer to athletic achievement than traditional performance.

Around the two-hour mark, the quartet hits what could be called the work's first major "groove" – though in Feldman's universe, a groove might consist of the same three-note pattern repeated with microscopic variations for twenty minutes. Here, FLUX demonstrates their understanding that this music isn't about dramatic peaks and valleys; it's about finding infinite universes within apparent simplicity. Their sound remains consistently hushed, creating an intimate listening environment that feels like eavesdropping on a conversation between instruments.

The middle sections reveal Feldman's genius for making repetition feel like discovery. What appears to be the same material cycling endlessly actually contains subtle harmonic shifts and rhythmic adjustments that accumulate like sedimentary layers. FLUX captures these nuances without ever breaking the spell of the work's hypnotic surface. Their bow changes are so seamless they seem to breathe as one organism.

By hour five, something magical happens – time stops meaning anything. The music exists in its own temporal dimension, and FLUX guides listeners into this altered state with the skill of experienced shamans. The final hour doesn't feel like an ending so much as a gradual fade into infinity, with the quartet maintaining their concentrated focus until the very last whisper of sound.

This recording stands as both a monument to FLUX Quartet's extraordinary musicianship and a definitive document of one of the most uncompromising works in the classical canon. In an age of shortened attention spans and instant gratification, their commitment to Feldman's vision feels almost revolutionary. They've created something that exists outside normal categories – not quite classical, not quite experimental, but entirely essential for anyone interested in music's outer limits.

String Quartet No. 2 isn't for everyone, but for those willing to take the journey, FLUX Quartet provides the perfect guides into Feldman's strange and beautiful world where six hours can feel like six minutes, and silence speaks louder than sound.