Cage: Music for Marcel Duchamp

A fresh approach to one of contemporary composition’s most iconoclastic and inventive figures, ‘As It Is’ is issued to mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of John Cage. Early Cage is the subject here, strikingly original songs and piano pieces from the 1930s and 1940s. Songs in which Cage set words by writers whose vision was as independent as his own – James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and e e cummings. They are performed by the Russian pianist Alexei Lubimov – who championed Cage’s work in Russia and later had a close working relationship with him – and his compatriot, vocalist Natalia Pschenitschnikova.

As Paul Griffiths writes, “The music exists in singing that has a raw, living edge, and it exists in piano tone that can be utterly simple and utterly remarkable. There is also a third presence, that of the producer, bringing forward the extraordinary resonances that come from Lubimov’s piano, with preparation or without.” With Manfred Eicher producing, the recording was made in December 2011 in Zürich. Lubimov grasps both the playfulness of the music and its message of freedom.

Lubimov previously included Cage’s In a Landscape on his 2002 debut recording for ECM New Series, Der Bote (461 8122), a disc of piano elegies. Among his other acclaimed recordings for the label are works by Scriabin, Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Schnittke, Arvo Pärt, and Valentin Silvestrov. Earlier this summer his double album of Debussy’s Preludes and other pieces (476 4735) attracted huge praise and was BBC Music Magazine’s ‘Recording of the Month’ in July. Natalia Pschenitschnikova has appeared on two previous ECM discs of Giya Kancheli as a flautist.

This double-CD set combines two of the key titles of Columbia Records’s legendary “Music of Our Time” series curated by David Behrman. Jeanne Kirstein’s recording of Cage’s early keyboard works remains a touchstone of Cagean interpretation notwithstanding the passage of time.

Christian Wolff recalls, "I remember Cage saying that Jeanne Kirstein’s playing caught the spirit in which the pieces were written at the time he wrote them—a kind of simple excitement and enthusiasm (also, surely, out of the discovery of the preparing of the piano and the great new sounds)."

Nigel Butterley is well-known as one of Australia's best composers. He has another life as a pianist and has been performing these Cage works for over 20 years. His sense of style and the colours he draws from the piano have been awarded the highest critical praise.

The interpreter is a very important person indeed in Cage’s piano music, and a top international expert like Steffen Schleiermacher is a must for a complete recording such as this one: he knows the nuts and bolts and all the fine nuances.