John Cage

Solo for Piano is the piano part of John Cage's Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1957/58), a piece that also stands on its own. It consists of 63 pages with 84 different types of graphic structures, which look like musical notation but give no clearly reproducible notes. Here the pianist Sabine Liebner, a specialist in new music, plays her own version, nearly seventy minutes long.

Cage (Los Angeles 1912 - New York 1992) was an American composer and a pioneer of indeterminacy. From the 1950s he made the genesis of his works depend on chance processes, and a few years later that randomness extended to performance itself, separating the compositional design from the sounding result. Liebner's recording is a co-production with Bayerischer Rundfunk, produced by Helmut Rohm, recorded and mixed by Jörg Moser with Kirsten Ermeler as engineer. Michael Rebhahn wrote the liner notes.

The Concert for Piano and Orchestra has no overall score, though every part is written out in detail. The orchestral parts are notated in three sizes that can be read, ambiguously, as duration or volume, and their notes came from various chance procedures, including turning irregularities in the music paper into notation. The piano part, by contrast, was composed without chance operations. Indeterminacy still governs its performance: the notation becomes a proposal, and every realisation must be decided anew. Working out a playable text from the page is left to the creative effort of the pianist. The Concert was first performed on 15 May 1958 at Town Hall in New York, with David Tudor at the piano and an ensemble conducted by Merce Cunningham. Cage dedicated it to Elaine de Kooning.

Liebner has made a speciality of this repertoire. Andreas Göbel of Kulturradio rbb called her "currently most important interpreter of the piano works by John Cage". Her reading here takes a single track of 69 minutes and 52 seconds, and it is one realisation among the infinite number the score allows. She plays almost all of the piano music of Cage and Morton Feldman, and her American repertoire also takes in Henry Cowell, Earle Brown, Christian Wolff, Pauline Oliveros and Tom Johnson.

CD, Wergo WER 6768 2, released in 2013 in the Edition John Cage series.