John Cage

Sabine Liebner plays piano music by Henry Cowell and John Cage, alternating the two composers across fourteen pieces. The works span 1912 to 1948 and trace the rise of American experimental music. They also document a fruitful teacher and student relationship, since Cage studied composition with Cowell before his brief, informal studies with Arnold Schoenberg.

Cowell was born in Menlo Park, California, in 1897 and died in 1965. Cage was born in Los Angeles in 1912 and died in New York in 1992. The disc was recorded on 11-13 December 2014 in Studio 2 of the Bayerischer Rundfunk in Munich, as a coproduction with BR. Wolfgang Rathert wrote the booklet notes. The album belongs to Wergo's series of Liebner's recordings.

Both composers extended the piano's sound through the strings, and both used Irish subject matter. Cowell's Three Irish Legends and The Banshee stand beside Cage's The Perilous Night, whose title goes back to an Irish folktale. The differences are just as clear. Cowell, with his towering clusters and the gentle string piano pieces such as Aeolian Harp and Sinister Resonance, builds a surreal but finally almost romantic world. A title like Aeolian Harp recalls Keats's Ode on a Grecian Urn and its unheard melodies. Cage's preparations disturb the listener's awareness. The key pressed and the sound heard no longer form a unity, and what sounds is the acoustic fingerprint of the preparation object and of the hammer striking the blocked strings. Cage's abstraction stresses the objective character of the sound. The Perilous Night, at thirteen minutes, is the longest piece here.

Cowell wrote specifically for the piano. Cage, in his prepared piano works, was inspired by percussion instruments and transferred their sounds to the keyboard. The Cage selection includes Dream, In the Name of the Holocaust, the Two Pieces for Piano and Primitive. The order alternates strictly, Cage first and Cowell second, from Tossed as it is Untroubled onward. Cowell's title piece Amiable Conversation lasts barely a minute, and the sequence closes with his The Snows of Fuji-Yama. The programme runs to 78 minutes.

CD, Wergo WER 7326 2, released in 2015.