Issuing a warning about such a beautiful piece as Feldman’s tribute to the great Abstract Expressionist painter would be unnecessary if it was couched within conventional time constraints. But the work is a prime example of his late obsession with extended durations – as Feldman famously put it, he was interested in writing music that transformed structure into scale. Pithy, inchoate melodic modules are transformed through Feldman’s time-space continuum over a four-and-a-half-hour duration that is intentionally disorientating and sonically snow-blinding. When material reoccurs, Feldman doesn’t want you to be waiting – that would be like Godot showing up. Instead, his pared-back motifs are in creative tension with his overarching structures as he plays tricks with memory, exploding the narrative recall of conventional musical structure. This music cannot be appreciated passively: it requires practice and patience.

And if it’s like that for listeners, imagine the unheralded physical and mental challenges for the performers. Normally large-scale structures depend on a catholicity of grandstanding gesture and massive instrumental hardware, a protocol Feldman wholly upends. For Philip Guston (1984) is the final part in a trilogy based around the ensemble of flute, percussion and piano, each instalment adding increasingly sophisticated instrumental doublings. The trio of Julia Breuer, Matthias Engler and Elmar Schrammel create a balmy default tone, but one that avoids spilling over into the sort of ambient repetition with which Feldman is often misrepresented. This performance is even more spacious and daringly poised than the California EAR Unit’s 1997 account (Bridge), and Wergo’s fastidious miking creates the illusion of a single voice, as flute and glockenspiel overtones entwine, while also having plenty definition. Perfection.

The Viola in my Life, Feldman’s nostalgic cycle portraying the intimate web of associations he had with the instrument, is less hardcore. The four parts of the cycle add up to a 40‑minute listen and Feldman doesn’t reach for such alienated extremes. The Cikada Ensemble and the Norwegian Radio Orchestra are expert, but it’s a shame violist Marek Konstantynowicz tends towards the expressive hard-sell, overplaying gestures that Karen Phillips on Feldman’s own recording (recently reissued on New World Records) keeps at an objective distance. Paying full price for a 40‑minute CD might make some smart. If so, the irony of a too-short Feldman CD won’t be lost on others.