Red Oaks

From the twinkling glockenspiel that opens "Above The Winter Oaks", it’s clear that Japanese sound-artist Hideki Umezawa has set out to construct a shimmering world of floating textures. Sounds of breathing sift delicately around sustained reverb-y tones; metallic sounds crackle between the speakers as isolated vibraphone sketches outline ambiguous chords. There’s little sense of harmonic gravity: the music exists as suspended drones, creating a meditative "OM" of sound that empties your head…

For this Alpha-Classics album of modernist music arranged for two pianos, Alexei Lubimov and Slava Poprugin play four essential works that yield some surprises in their keyboard versions. Three of the pieces are transcriptions of instrumental music, specifically Igor Stravinsky's arrangement of his Concerto in E flat major, "Dumbarton Oaks," John Cage's reduction of Erik Satie's Socrate, and Darius Milhaud's four-hand transcription of Satie's Cinéma (composed as a soundtrack for the short Dadaist film Entr'acte, used in the ballet Relâche), with Stravinsky's Concerto for two pianos solo performed as it was originally written.