It was Arnold Schoenberg who rather glibly characterised John Cage, his pupil for two years, as “not a composer but an inventor – of genius”. But in the music that Bertrand Chamayou includes in this collection, Cage the inventor seems indivisible from Cage the composer. Cage wrote Bacchanale, his first piece for the instrument that he had devised, the prepared piano, in 1940. Inspired by the experiments of Henry Cowell, Cage had placed a variety of felt, metal and rubber objects under or between the strings of a grand piano, drastically modifying its tone, and so creating a wholly new sound world.
The most substantial and best known work that Cage would compose for his invention would be the Sonatas and Interludes that he completed in 1948. But as Chamayou demonstrates, the stand-alone pieces for prepared piano that he composed before and after that hour-long set do much more than just revel in their sheer sonic novelty.
Cage2 was recorded at the same time as Chamayou’s disc of Satie and Cage which was released last autumn. It had begun life as a sequence of pieces, all originally written for dance, which he had put together for a dance project; in performance it required four pianos, each prepared differently, so that the sound is sometimes bright, metallic, gamelan-like, sometimes muffled, mysterious and percussive.
While Cage’s later, more challenging music and the ideas that lie behind it, still arouse so much suspicion and ill-informed controversy – few pieces in the history of music have been more traduced and misunderstood than his 4’33” – it’s good to be reminded of his intrinsic originality and vivid imagination. In its own distinctive way every one of these pieces is a brightly coloured gem; some, like the earliest, Bacchanale with its driving, Bartókian rhythms, are unbuttoned and exuberant; others, like the miniatures that make up The Perilous Night, and A Valentine Out of Season, both composed when Cage was attempting a reconciliation with his wife, can be enigmatic or touchingly hesitant. Chamayou’s performance of all of them, each complex rhythm razor sharp, every phrase perfectly articulated, is exemplary. It’s a fabulous disc, a true revelation.
Stream it on Apple Music (above) or on Spotify
