In 1971, the Rothko Chapel, a meditation space and museum supported by the art patrons and philanthropists Dominique and John de Menil, opened in Houston. Missing from the ceremony was Mark Rothko, the artist who had painted a series of 14 large canvases for the chapel. The year before the opening, Rothko, who had been experiencing severe depression, took his own life.

In attendance was the composer Morton Feldman, Rothko’s friend from New York, who considered Rothko’s art a major influence on his own work. The de Menils asked Feldman to compose a piece for performance in the chapel. Before the year was out, Feldman had done so: the austerely beautiful, daringly static and pervasively quiet “Rothko Chapel,” scored simply for viola, celesta, percussion, two solo singers and wordless chorus. This is perhaps the most defining work of Feldman’s inimitable art.

Yet though the piece has had wide impact within the sphere of contemporary music, it is seldom performed. Word must finally be getting out. Alice Tully Hall was nearly full on Thursday night for the second program of the TullyScope festival, when Axiom, an excellent contemporary music ensemble from the Juilliard School, and the Clarion Choir gave a pensive and mystical performance of the 30-minute “Rothko Chapel” in a fascinating program of works by Feldman and the Romanian-born modernist Gyorgy Kurtag.

Feldman was inspired by the New York Abstract Expressionist school of painting, especially by Rothko, whose works seemingly do away with formal design and present images of soft-edged shapes and colors that evoke spiritual and psychological states. Feldman was emboldened by the Abstract Expressionist painters to compose music that similarly eluded formal design and strove for purity of expression, quietude and mysticism.

The subdued spirituality of Feldman’s music is no longer so unusual. But what many listeners still find challenging is the lack of discernible exposition and development, as in “Rothko Chapel.” Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Louder

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“Rothko Chapel” unfolds as a series of fragmentary viola lines, flickers of notes on the celesta, isolated wordless chords intoned by the chorus and subdued rhythmic figures in the percussion. Little shifts of harmony or fleeting pileups of instrumental sounds seem major musical events. But nothing disrupts the overall mood of ethereal beauty and spiritual loneliness. Until late in the piece, that is, when out of nowhere the viola plays a wistful “quasi-Hebraic” melody, in Feldman’s term, a tune he had written as a teenager. Given the memorial nature of the piece, this uncharacteristic Feldman stroke seems spiritually right and musically gratifying. Continue reading the main story

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The calm, sensitive performance, conducted by Jeffrey Milarsky, conveyed the simplicity and directness of this wondrously restrained music. And the audience, which had listened with uncommon contemplativeness, gave the performers a long ovation.

A performance of Feldman’s 1981 “Bass Clarinet and Percussion,” comparably soft-spoken and minimalist, was also engrossing. The concert began with Mr. Kurtag’s trio “Hommage à R. Sch.” (1990), inspired by Schumann, an intriguing series of short, aphoristic, pungently modern pieces played here compellingly by Christopher Pell, clarinetist; Jocelin Pan, violist; and Conor Hanick, pianist. The concert ended with Mr. Kurtag’s expressionist 25-minute song cycle “Messages of the Late R. V. Troussova,” a setting of 21 love poems by Rimma Dalos. Lauren Snouffer, a rich-voiced, agile young soprano, was very impressive in these vocally and dramatically demanding songs.

So far, TullyScope is batting two for two with terrific concerts.