Cage: In a Landscape

“the Bach feels self-concious, though the Cage is full of immediacy” BBC Music Magazine, December 2012 ***

“'bachCage' is a kind concept album imagining Bach as the first composer of widespread influence and Cage the last....Tristano's Interludes are for prepared piano; and, by the time he ends with the Bach Minuet, the full treatment is in place for Bach too - subtle and amusing.” Gramophone Magazine, October 2012

“In an age of anxiety and conflict, this music looks to higher levels of consciousness to provide assurance. Regardless of whether you share such faith, there is no doubting the beauty of the music of the sincerity and conviction of these excellent performances.” BBC Music Magazine, September 2009 ****

“…there are moments of understated beauty, notably in Valentin Silvestrov's Lullaby for violin and piano. Written to commemorate the centenary of Tchaikovsky's death, a series of haunting melodic variations are woven in the violin around a descending chaconne-like chord progression, with the piano progressively reinforcing each melodic statement.” Gramophone Magazine, Awards Issue 2009

“…Cage's notoriety was derived from his more overtly radical ideas, but he was equally capable of more subtle kinds of subversion. This sonically immaculate CD is packed with such eminently approachable, slightly puckish music which typifies Cage's work during the period, with Metamorphosis and Ophelia being further highlights. ...Henck is particularly adept at preserving the composer's unique musicality which is often over-sanitised by modern performance and production techniques.” BBC Music Magazine, September 2005 ****

“The shock here is that this is simply piano music – no preparations, nothing played from the inside, every detail notated. In a Landscape, with a dozen recordings already, tops Cage's greatest hits. It was written for dance, can be played on harp or piano, and again exercises its uncanny, mesmeric powers in this performance by Herbert Henck, who takes it much more slowly than the marked tempo. But Henck's performances throughout are fastidious in representing every detail of the scores.
The longest work, The Seasons (1947), was a ballet for Lincoln Kirstein which, like the Sonatas and Interludes, shows Cage's interest in Indian philosophy before he moved on to Zen.
At this period, perceptibly under the influence of Satie, Cage would assemble a collection of attractive sounds and then rotate them automatically, a procedure that became his trademark.
The Two Pieces (1946) use some of the same autonomous sonorities as The Seasons in a different context.
Some of these early pieces are not linked to dance but stem from Cage's study with Schoenberg and his development of his own kind of row technique. Late in life Cage liked his early key- board pieces but found A Metamorphosis the least interesting. These are fascinating documents, well recorded, which bring this part of Cage's enormous output quite naturally into the mainstream of 20th-century piano music.” Gramophone Classical Music Guide, 2010