A favourite Feldman piece for its curiously claustrophobic quality, For Samuel Beckett seems to extract the quantum of the titular author’s dryness, his bleakness, and his brevity, and smear it across a canvas for a good fifty minutes. His final composition, it doesn’t really feel like much a ‘summing up’ – more a hint at a movement to come, away from some of the lovelier, more glittering surfaces of relatively recent works, and into a zone that feels somehow claustrophobic, but not unwelcome. It’s not lush, by any means, but it does feel as though there are more threads being woven here than in some of its immediate predecessors. Performances by Klangforum Wein and The New Music Chamber Of Orchestra have much to recommend them, but I have a particular fondness for this Ensemble Modern performance; not only was it the first Feldman I ever heard, it also seems to sum up much of what makes this composer, and this work, so extraordinary.