Satie & Cage

From Cage to Satie, from Satie to Cage, the musical ping-pong proposed by this CD is exciting. It was Cage that pointed to Satie as an innovative composer, who anticipated Marcel Duchamp, and in so doing indicated an ideal bond between Satie and himself. It's not rare, therefore, that concert programs or recordings unite the two, what is rare is the ease and frequency heard here, of the exchange between them. A play list of a high order, but there is more. The premise for this recording enters the heart of a conflict of ideas in Contemporary music. Cage, pro-Satie, was considered revolutionary. Pierre Boulez, who at first was in good relation with Cage, then in open conflict, considered Satie a banal neoclassicist and Cage himself, like Satie, nothing other than a dilettante, a clown that perpetually repeats himself and an eternal adolescent.

Mario Gamba from the attached booklet

Although some might claim that coupling Erik Satie and John Cage is quite worn-out, novel and respectful efforts by this Bulgarian-born pianist will eraducate such a prejudice.
First DeConstruction, composed by Dianova herself, features electroacoustic sounds taken from what one hardly hears: a prepared piano going back to unprepared.

John Cage (1912–92) is regarded as one of the most influential and controversial composers of the 20th century. It is not only his music that this reputation is based on – his ideas were revolutionary, and he cast doubt on the supremacy of European art, and music when it was unchallenged and such views were considered heretic. Cage rejected the status held by harmony, instrumentation, and even the development of music from one point to another. He disconnected harmony from rhythm to liberate western music from its hitherto privileged hierarchies – iconoclastic stuff for 1940s America!

Morton Feldman, Erik Satie, John Cage - Rothko Chapel (2015) {ECM New Series 2378}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 223 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 162 Mb
Full Artwork @ 300 dpi (png) -> 130 Mb | 5% repair rar
© 2015 ECM Records | ECM New Series 2378
Classical / Avant-Garde / Chamber Music

This is a marvelous release, equally perfect in conception, execution, and engineering. The program locates the intellectual origins of the American avant-garde composers Morton Feldman and John Cage not in postwar European developments, but in the music of Erik Satie, who with each decade seems a more pioneering figure. Feldman and Cage here seem not modernists, but postmodernists. Front and center at the beginning is Feldman's masterpiece Rothko Chapel (1967), a chamber-ensemble-and-chorus evocation of the Houston, Texas, chapel adorned with paintings by, and partly designed by, the Abstract Expressionist painter Mark Rothko.

This is a handsome-looking compact disc release, with strikingly muted graphics in cool purple tones, featuring Latvian violinist Gidon Kremer and Japanese harpist Naoko Yoshina. Here the pretty graphics go a little too far: the buyer finds no listing of compositions on the outside of the package and has no way of knowing what is played aside from a bare mention of the names of the 11 composers featured. That's where the All Classical Guide comes in. The works were all written in the twentieth century. They are: Michio Miyagi's Haru no umi (Ocean in Spring, a calming, melodic piece); Kaija Saariaho's Nocturne for violin solo (a somewhat avant-garde coloristic piece); Toru Takemitsu's Stanza II for harp and tape (also pretty far out and very Japanese-sounding); Yuji Takahashi's Insomnia for violin, voices, and kugo (strange, but oddly soothing); a movement from Satie's Le fils des étoiles as arranged by Takahashi (austere); Jean Françaix's Five Little Duets (100 percent charming); the Étude for violin from Richard Strauss's Daphne (also charming); Six Melodies by John Cage (simple and pleasant); Arvo Pärt's Spiegel im Spiegel (even simpler and not startling); Nino Rota's love theme from The Godfather (you know this one); and the final movement from Schnittke's Suite in the Old Style (gently Classical except for one deliberately horrendous dissonance).