"My free life within Four Walls" began with concert performances in 1992 and beyond, followed by a number of stage performances with dancers in Finland and Russia. The collaboration of John Cage with Merce Cunningham began in 1942; and 70 years later, in 2012, knowing my admiration for Cage and my numerous concerts with his music, the outstanding dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov proposed to embody the "Four Walls" in a dance on the stage of his Baryshnikov Arts Center (New York) with the participation of legendary ‘Merce Cunningham Dance Company’, which by this time officially completed its activities. The director Robert Swinston and 8 dancers played with me the performance of the Four Walls / Doubletoss Interludes, and this became a worthy completion of the history of the Four Walls as a theater, while this piece remains a wonderful independent music, anticipating the style of Glass, Pärt and in general, the entire movement of minimalism. In 2015, BAC founded the Cage-Cunningham Foundation, and I received a Fellow Prize of the First-Ever Cage Cunningham Fellowship." (Alexei Lubimov)

This new album release by the Latvian Radio Choir and conductor Sigvards Kļava on Ondine is devoted to choral works by the legendary American composer and music pioneer John Cage (1912–1992), one of the most leading figures in 20th Century music. John Cage is the dictionary definition of an avant-garde composer. Choral music and John Cage might seem like an odd pairing. And indeed, strictly speaking, Cage wrote only two compositions for chorus, both of which appear on this album: Hymns and Variations (1979) and Four2 (1990). The other works on the album are written for ensembles that are more or less open-ended and which have been interpreted here for choral forces. One reason Cage and choruses did not mix well may have been his notorious hostility to harmony in music. Arnold Schoenberg told Cage that he lacked any feeling for harmony, and that this would be a wall between him and his goal of being a composer. Given all this, it is no wonder that Cage and choruses didn’t tend to mingle together. And so it was not until Cage was 67 years old that he wrote his first work for choral forces: Hymns and Variations.

REVIEWS:

John Cage was barely a choral composer. But by combining the couple of pieces he wrote for chorus with a creative interpretation of the flexible instrumentation of a few other scores, you can arrive at an hour or so of mysterious, wordless music for vocal ensemble. “Hymns and Variations” (1979) is the earliest work on this intimate and luminous new album from the Latvian Radio Choir. Cage subtracts some notes from two hymns by the early American composer William Billings, and extends the duration of some that remain, creating an eerily pure, serene suggestion of 18th-century harmonies.

--The New York Times

That Cage delighted in provoking audiences is undoubtable, but his mischief concealed his seriousness of purpose. He revealed and explored a vast New World of sound which had hitherto been a terra incognita of the mind. But above all, Cage was a tireless proselytizer of the gospel of beauty and created some of the 20th century’s most radically beautiful music. These strands are united here in this breathtaking collection from Ondine of some of the composer’s late choral music performed by the Latvian Radio Choir.

--MusicWeb International

John Cage and choral music might seem strange bedfellows, but there was no corner of the musical landscape that this dedicated breaker of composition rules didn’t want to deconstruct. With its drifting, otherworldly textures, Five, from 1988, could almost have come from the soundtrack of 2001: A Space Odyssey, while Four2, astonishingly written for a high school choir, includes a tonal tenor and bass pairing, oozing quite unexpected calm.

[One] can’t but be stunned by the fearless skill of Sigvards Kļava’s choir as they navigate the most jagged, fragmented notes and pitches—the musical equivalent of climbing Mount Everest just with your hands and feet.

--BBC Music Magazine

There are, I think, two possible approaches to this recording. One is simply to listen through it and let the effect of the (very different) pieces on it wash over one, reacting to each in turn. The other is to read the excellent booklet notes by James Pritchett and then listen to the music, following in more or less detail what he explains in them. Either process would work, because the music is intrinsically interesting and frequently very impressive. It must be said as well that the singers sound as though they are enjoying themselves enormously.

--Gramophone

Many observers have suggested that in John Cage's late "number pieces" it's the players, rather than the music itself, that carry the performance. The score for Five3, after all, simply consists of bits of music-- single notes or short phrases-- bracketed by a starting time on one side and the range of time for completing the bit of music on the other. This piece, then, is a 40-minute stretch of quiet held tones punctuated by silences, and the performance is phenomenal. Trombonist Monique Buzzarté and the Arditti members often play microtones apart, with impossible intensity. The Arditti has recorded lots of Cage, and it shows: their bowstrokes are as clear and unwavering as Cage's line drawings. With so much pianissimo playing, you hear the light friction of bow against string, and bow changes are absolutely seamless. This is a stunning addition to Mode's ongoing Complete John Cage Edition, for which this is the 19th disc. --Sarah Cahill, ClassicsToday.com

CAGE – SA TIE – FELDMAN – TAKAHASHI sums up the focus of this album. All of these works by Cage are influenced by Satie. Cage’s friend and colleague Morton Feldman made an arrangement of Cage’s solo piano “Cheap Imitation” for a trio of piano, flutes/piccolo and glockenspiel. Feldman’s admiration for the pianist Aki Takahashi caused him to gift this arrangement to her. And, full circle, we have the repertoire of this album. The major discovery is Feldman’s arrangement of Cheap Imitation for this very Feldmanesque instrumental ensemble. It is unknown why Feldman made this arrangement in 1980. Knowing of Takahashi’s reputation as a pianist specializing in new music, Feldman had invited her to be an artist in residence at the university where he taught. When she was leaving, Feldman gave a musical score to Takahashi as a gift. It was a copy of John Cage’s solo piano piece Cheap Imitation with annotations by Feldman. He told her that this was an instrumental version of this piece: flute, piano, and glockenspiel.

In the last years of his life, John Cage wrote a great many so-called "Number Pieces" the title indicating the number of performing musicians. While most of these pieces indicate which instruments are to be played, as well as the sounds that are to be produced, other pieces offer only general tone descriptions or a framework for choosing the tones oneself. What these pieces do have in common is time\-organization: Cage designates the measure within which the tones must be played. Should one play these sound\-sequences within the interval quickly, then one must wait for the beginning of the next measure in order to continue; should one play with an even slowness, the separate intervals are joined without interruption. And so, each performance of the same piece is different: in one instance an even flow of sounds, in another a pulsation of rapid responses accompanied by pauses (including all variations). An exception is "Two²". Here the two pianists do not play according to a stopwatch, but rather by reacting to one another: Although the piece indicates measure, it does not assign tempo or even pulse. While both interpreters play independently of each other, they may continue on to the next measure only when the other player has finished his. Cage decided on the number of tones within a measure by drawing upon the rules of Renga, Japanese linked poetry, in which the number of syllables per verse are set at 5, 7, 5, 7, 7. As the pedal is continuously depressed, the notes sound into one another and this inner structure remains undetected.

The Solo for Piano is part of the legendary “Concert for Piano and Orchestra.” It is an indeterminate work, consisting of 63 pages made of 84 different types of composition, each appearing as its own type of notation. The performer creates his own performance by choosing which pages to play and in which order; pages can also be omitted. Cage began by choosing, using chance operations, a way of composing based on either his Music for Piano series – single notes, or on Winter Music – chords, or aggregates of notes. Chance operations would also determine whether a variation on one of these two types would be used or whether something completely new, with its own subsequent variations, would be written. When Cage wrote the Two Pieces for Piano (1935), he was already studying with Arnold Schoenberg. Schoenberg’s influence on Cage undoubtedly accounts for the music’s 12-tone-row-based organization, but Cage’s own version of this system had the twelve note series broken down into short pitch/rhythm cells. Later Cage began a study of Indian philosophy and came to believe that the purpose of music is “to imitate nature in its manner of operation” and “to sober and quiet the mind thus rendering it susceptible to divine influences.” These principles underlie another set of piano pieces that Cage wrote in the months May to August, 1946, entitled again, Two Pieces for Piano (1946). These later pieces are more extensively worked out and possess a sense of urgency and heightened drama, brought about in the first piece by long silences and in the second by a quicker flow and variety of musical events distributed over a greater range of the instrument. The silences heard in the first piece are an early example of what later became a pillar of Cage’s thought and music — the primacy of silence.

Classical Music

Boris Berman's second Naxos release devoted to John Cage's piano music presents a handsome cross-section of the composer's prolific output from the 1940s. For most of his prepared piano music, Cage gave meticulous instructions as to the manipulation of the piano's strings with rubber wedges, screws, bolts, and other implements. The ensuing sonorities transform the piano into a one-man percussion ensemble, with a heavy Gamelan accent. Yet no two pianos prepared in the same way ever sound alike. Each recorded version of a Cage prepared piano work differs in timbre. In Cage's 1944 Root of an Unfocus, for instance, Steffen Schleiermacher (on MDG) conveys a stark, interrogation-room-like aura through the deep resonance of his left-hand "drumbeats" and buzzing right-hand stabs. By contrast, Boris Berman's latest recording on Naxos suggests a smaller, muffled drum, and more rounded right-hand interjections.


Primitive's dancing rhythms stay on a steadier track in Berman's performance, yet Schleiermacher's softer-grained reading conveys less of a pitch range. Perhaps the most obvious differences are found in The Unavailable Memory Of, which employs only three pitches. Schleiermacher's preparations render the notes as B-flat, F, and D: a major triad. With Berman, we hear an E-flat rather than a D, as well as a slower basic tempo. And compare Schleiermacher's murky, mysterious sounds in A Room, to Berman's simpler, funkier palette. The point is that both Berman and Schleiermacher understand and play this music fantastically well. Of course, Berman has the advantage of Naxos' budget price and slightly better sound. Cage-a-holics, of course, should have the valuable Schleiermacher series and Margaret Leng Tan's eloquent, meticulous performances of selected works. Listeners new to Cage's prepared piano oeuvre, however, will be enchanted by the variety, humor, and beauty that typifies Berman's program. Solidly recommended. [12/28/2001]
--Jed Distler, ClassicsToday.com