Customer Reviews

John Cage: The Works for Piano, Vol. 7

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Margaret Leng Tan has devoted much of her life to studying and performing John Cage's prepared piano music. For a prepared pianist, Cage's Sonatas and Interludes is the equivalent of J.S. Bach's "48." Leng Tan has examined the original preparations used by Cage in the 1940s as a means to get at the "truth" of this work; her playing is majesterial, buoyantly rhythmic and evokes the grand gesture, yet is gentle, incisive and intimate when the music calls for it. Leng Tan's reading of "Sonatas and Interludes" is absolutely authoritative, and has been welcomed enthusiastically even by English critics - not usually well-disposed to the work of John Cage - as enlightening and revelatory. This mode CD is a benchmark recording in the long history of the Sonatas and Interludes, and should be regarded as a "go to" option for the work; something to measure all future recordings against. It also includes the charming, long "lost" early Cage piece "Chess Pieces" and music of Vittorio Rieti. This is in every way outstanding.

I found these recordings performed by Cage connoisseur Margaret Leng Tan a wonderful oasis in my several months journey as a complete novice to understand John Cage. These are all early works, rarely seen in performance, the Sonatas for prepared piano (specific modifications with screws, bolts and felt wraps for each piece) and a wonderful and rare recording of spiritually satisfying "Chess Pieces". As a contemplative I find them all, each and every piece on this wonderful album, spiritually refreshing. As Margaret Leng Tan explains in a separate documentary ( John Cage: The Works for Piano 6), the modifications designed for each piece in the "Prepared Piano" series really create a unique instrument that is no longer piano. The "voices" created by these modifications are sometimes percussion ( eg the tingling of a washer against a screw when the key is struck) and always a haunting journey into the mysticism of sound. Margaret Leng Tan's pure delight in Cage shines in every sound. This album includes one non Cage piece,also from the 1944 "imagery of Chess" show as a companion to "Chess Pieces" that belongs in this group.

As important as any other composers' sonatas, etudes, suites or fugues, this work when performed well often sounds like a Howling, On the Road answer to a series of 18th century questions. It answers those questions decisively, with equal parts clarity, vulnerability, insight and abstraction, but decisively all the same.

Unfortunately this performance fails to translate that answer.
By sonata VIII the player seems to remember she might have a soul or at least the responsibility of interpreting for one. Much of the Sonatas and Interludes before that sound as if they were performed by a school boy who urgently needs to go to the bathroom. My heart started sinking about half way through the first sonata. The treatment of sonata VII is unforgivable. The playing is heavy handed and terribly rushed, the conversation taking place in that sonata is lost completely in a lack of dynamic range accented by a pace that makes the piece unrecognizable as the delicate, fragile discourse it was. When one should be gently touching the petals of a flower or stroking it with the back of their finger, dazzled with it's impossibility, most of this performance is grabbing that flower by the stem and shoving it your mouth.

Do not buy this disk.