John Cage

John Cage's Sonatas and Interludes, composed between February 1946 and March 1948, is his most ambitious work for prepared piano. It has sixteen sonatas and four interludes for an instrument whose strings are fitted with screws, bolts and pieces of plastic and rubber. The Moscow-born pianist Boris Berman recorded the whole cycle for Naxos in 1998. Cage had arrived at the prepared piano in 1940, when a dance performance needed percussion music and the theatre had room only for a piano.

Berman studied with Lev Oborin at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory, left the Soviet Union in 1973 and later headed the piano department of the Yale School of Music. He recorded the cycle at St. John Chrysostom Church in Newmarket, Canada, from 11 to 13 July 1998, on a Yamaha CF3, with Norbert Kraft producing and engineering and Bonnie Silver producing and editing. David Revill's booklet note links the music to Cage's reading of Ananda K. Coomaraswamy and the Indian theory of the permanent emotions, the 'white' and 'black' ones set around tranquillity. The proportions rest on what Cage called a micro-macrocosmic rhythmic structure, and he found the preparations by trial on his own Steinway. The order is symmetrical: four sonatas, an interlude, four sonatas, two interludes, four sonatas, an interlude and four more, with Sonatas XIV and XV joined as Gemini, after Richard Lippold. Maro Ajemian gave the first performance on 11 January 1949. Reviewing the recording in MusicWeb International (2000), Rob Barnett wrote of "the whispered ice-crystal beauty of this music" and doubted anyone would better "Berman and Naxos's cleanly engaging recording".

Naxos CD 8.554345, recorded in July 1998 and released in 1999, with booklet notes by David Revill.