Morton Feldman’s music, the perceptive Alex Ross once wrote, works best in isolation. A week in mid-April had begun with splendid public chamber music: the exuberant Cuarteto Latinoamericano in a “Historic Sites” setting, playing music to match in an animated Mexican restaurant in East L.A. It had ended with the vast but intensely private expanse of Feldman’s String Quartet No. 2, in a setting far less appropriate, surrounded by spectators and gallerygoers free to come and go, strolling on hardwood floors nearly as resonant as those at Disney Hall, and with conversations audible near and far including those of children. I knew that the last two hours of the six-hour performance, with the County Museum officially closed and the audience reduced to believers, would turn into the proper setting. Long before those hours, however, I was put sufficiently out of sorts by the affront to Morty Feldman and his dedicated performers — just another LACMA boo-boo — to flee to the refuge of my own DVD player and my... More >>>