A rare concert performance of Samuel Beckett’s radio play Words and Music with American composer, Morton Feldman’s score. Renowned Beckett actors Barry McGovern and Stephen Brennan play the spoken roles of Words/Joe and Croak with a conducted ensemble of Beckett Chamber Music Series musicians playing the role of Music/Bob. The performance is directed by Everett Frost, who produced and directed the award-winning American national broadcast premieres of Beckett's five completed radio plays. Preceding Beckett’s radio play are performances of Edgard Varèse Density 21.5 for solo flute and chamber works by Morton Feldman. 
 
Director, Everett Frost writes:
 
Words and Music originated as a BBC commission for a radio play given in 1961 to John Beckett – a significant presence in the BBC music department as well as a highly regarded composer and conductor, who had previously composed music to accompany texts of his cousin, Samuel Beckett, whose first radio play, All That Fall (1956) had been a stunning success. In the ensuing collaboration, Samuel Beckett dramatizes the initially reluctant efforts of Words (called Joe in the play) and Music (Bob) to collaborate under the duress of Croak, their imperious, though ineffectual, club-wielding master – an old man seeking erotic satisfaction in the sublimation of music. In Words and Music, Beckett once observed, “Music always wins”.
                 
The play premiered on the BBC in 1962.  Sadly, and for reasons never understood, John Beckett withdrew his music soon thereafter, consigning this remarkable "words and music tandem" (in Samuel Beckett's phrase) to a lamentable obscurity.  And so it remained until 1985 when I raised the prospect of including Words and Music in the American national broadcast premieres of all Beckett's extant radio plays as part of the celebrations of his eightieth birthday. The problem was that Words and Music required half the play to be written by the composer for whom Beckett had specifically designed it. A different composer would result a different drama. We tiptoed tentatively into a discussion of possible composers and he brightened when I suggested that a commission might be easier if the composer were an American, and immediately suggested Morton Feldman. He had been both pleased and amused by Feldman having created a very long piece for the Rome Opera from his very short poem, "Neither". Feldman accepted with alacrity and humility.
 
The difficulty was that his music had moved towards elaborate progressions of slowly evolving layers of sound, but this was a collaboration requiring radical concision and abrupt changes of mood and texture, and he suspected that it would alter the course of his work. But he entered into it wholeheartedly. We discussed the play over a period of months, and Morton Feldman's insight into (in his word) the "quintessence" of the drama, its elusive 'Beckettian' qualities, and its musical requirements was always profoundly insightful. In an interview following the recording sessions, Feldman observed:
 
I tried to carry through the focus of the material, or the quintessence of the material and then present it in a more fragmentary way. It is a technical metaphor, and a technical metaphor brings forth, hopefully, the psychological or the emotional or the dramatic situation.
 
His music is fully – structurally – a part of, not an attachment to, this version of the collaborative work. The score appeared scarcely a week before the recording sessions were to begin, and we recorded the play in March 1987. Morton Feldman's generosity of spirit and exacting ear were an inspiration throughout the rehearsals and recording sessions. It proved a memorable collaborative experience treasured by one and all: musicians, actors, technicians, composer, conductor, and director.
 
A month later, in April a music festival in Holland premiered Morton Feldman's "For Samuel Beckett" an hour-long orchestral work elaborating the structure and themes of the radio play without the time constraints imposed by the drama. Tragically, it would be his final work. Morton Feldman died very suddenly of cancer on 3 Sept. 1987.