John Cage

John Cage - Bird Cage (2000) {Electronic Music Foundation EMF CD 013}
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© 2000 Electronic Music Foundation | EMF CD 013
Contemporary Classical / Electronic / Experimental / Avant-Garde

In 1972, John Cage, accompanied by a film crew from Germany, went to upstate New York to work for 3 days in the State University of New York at Albany's electronic music studio. He carried with him three piles of tapes: (1) sounds of birds in aviaries that he had made in the prior two weeks, (2) recordings of himself singing his 'Mureau', and (3) ambient sounds. While listening to tapes of himself singing Mureau, he commented, "It makes the birds seem less ridiculous." The result was 'Birdcage', a complex, exuberant, and joyful fabric of juxtapositions of all of the sounds, to be played back in a space in which, as Cage put it, people were free to move and birds to fly.

Though he may not be a piano superstar, Bruce Brubaker is clearly a musician to watch. On this recording of solo piano works by Philip Glass and John Cage, Brubaker somehow shifts between these two very different modernist composers to create a seamless disc of mesmerizing keyboard music. While Glass's own playing is often precise and austere, Brubaker is a different beast altogether. With him, we get a hint of Impressionism and a sense of contemplation with each note. The five parts of Metamorphosis are given shades of melancholy, along with frenzy; on the expansive "Mad Rush," Brubaker goes wild where he has to, but always returns to the piece's calming, sweet center. The piano music of John Cage is limited to just two cuts–"A Room" and "Dream"–but they, too, are hauntingly beautiful (especially the latter, longer piece).

John Cage: Early Piano Music comes from Herbert Henck, an experienced hand with the work of Cage, having previously recorded Music for Piano, Music of Changes, and Sonatas and Interludes in addition to a mighty swath of first-tier twentieth-century literature for piano for various labels, most notably Wergo and ECM New Series. These are early works for standard, not prepared, piano, and some of these pieces will be as familiar to dyed-in-the-wool Cageans as "Happy Birthday." This puts the pressure on Henck to excel, and he does so spectacularly well here. The disc includes the two sets entitled Two Pieces for Piano, the piano version of The Seasons, Metamorphosis, In a Landscape, Ophelia, and the fragmentary Quest. The pieces date from 1935 to 1948, the same range covered by pianist Jeanne Kirstein in her pioneering 1967 survey of Cage's piano music for CBS Masterworks.

John Cage - Indeterminacy & Solo For Piano [Fontana Mix] (Deutsche Übersetzung)
Joachim Król, Rezitation / Susanne Kessel, Klavier / Martin Erdmann, Übersetzung
EAC+LOG+CUE | FLAC: 169 MB | Full Artwork: 82 MB | 5% Recovery Info
Label/Cat#: Oehms # OC 855 | Country/Year: Germany 2012
Genre: Classical | Style: Contemporary, Recital

"…Joachim Król’s reading is suitably undemonstrative, but the novel aspect of his role is that the text has been translated into German. As one might expect, this alters the experience in a fundamental—but not necessarily frustrating—way. Yes, listeners who don’t speak German will lose the sense of the stories, but, in an ironic Cagean twist, this in turn may allow them to focus greater attention upon the music, and perhaps notice the musicality, rather than just the meaning, of the language…" ~Fanfare