This one carries real weight. Issued by Another Timbre on the occasion of his 90th birthday, At Home - a 4-CD box set gathering five hours of domestic and archive recordings - marks the end of John Tilbury's recording career. There will be no more. What remains is this: a final, quietly monumental document from one of the most singular pianists of the last sixty years.
Tilbury's place in the history of contemporary, improvised, and experimental music is beyond dispute. A member of AMM for decades alongside Keith Rowe and Eddie Prévost, a veteran of Cornelius Cardew's Scratch Orchestra, the biographer of Cardew himself, and the defining interpreter of Morton Feldman, Howard Skempton, and the English experimental school - his touch at the keyboard, weighted, patient, almost speech-like, changed how a generation understood what a piano could do.
In 2018, at the age of 82, Tilbury stopped giving concerts. Living in Deal, on the Kent coast, without a car, he withdrew from the stage - but not from music. From then until spring 2026, Simon Reynell travelled to Deal every six or nine months to record him playing piano and clavichord in the lean-to extension at the back of the terrace house he shares with his wife Janice. They recorded whatever Tilbury wanted to play - pieces from Elizabethan songbooks, new compositions sent by old friends from Scratch Orchestra days - until, around his 90th birthday, Tilbury decided the work was done.
The result is an unusual and deeply moving collection. The domestic recordings encounter late works written for Tilbury by Michael Parsons, Christopher Hobbs, Dave Smith, Mark R. Taylor, John Lely, Erika Fox, and Catherine Kontz, alongside Skempton miniatures, Cardew's earliest piano pieces, Linda Catlin Smith's Poire, Feldman's Madame Press Died Last Week at Ninety, and Tilbury's own O'Hara Improvisations, interpreting performative drawings by Morgan O'Hara. Threaded among them are archive recordings reaching back to around 1970 - Christian Wolff's For Pianist, Cardew's Volo Solo, Feldman's Piece for Four Pianos with Philip Thomas, Mark Knoop, and Catherine Laws, duos with Tania Chen, an organ improvisation with Keith Rowe, the extraordinary For Samuel Beckett with Sebastian Lexer, and What is the Word, Tilbury's voice and organ setting of Beckett, recorded in King's College Chapel, Cambridge.
Presented in a beautifully produced box with a 20-page booklet featuring extensive sleevenotes by Clive Bell, At Home is both a summation and a farewell - the sound of a lifetime's discipline distilled into a domestic room, a lean-to on the Kent coast, where one of the great musical minds of our time played, for the last time, exactly what he wanted to play. Essential in every sense.
