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4.0 out of 5 stars
Tan once again proves her credentials as a Cage intepreter, Nov 15 2003
Given the stature of Margaret Leng Tan as an interpreter of John Cage's piano music, it was a wise move of Mode to assign at least one volume of their ongoing Cage piano music project to her. Even though the works here are not--with two exceptions--Cage at his best, the results are eminently satisfactory.The first third of this disc is devoted to miniatures from the 1940s. Triple-Paced appears twice, first in a piano version, replete with Cowellesque strumming inside the keyboard, and secondly in a tightened, revised version for prepared piano. Tan's rhythmic snap is ideally suited to both versions of this cheerful dance piece. Also for dance is the prepared piano Totem Ancestor, a marginally less sophisticated sister to the later work. Rather less impressive are the two jazz-inflected works that follow. Both Ad Lib--left incomplete by the composer and completed by Tan herself--and A Jazz Study are somewhat halfhearted essays in the style, though they are still entertaining. Much finer is the hypnotic pre-minimalist prepared piano monody of Music for Marcel Duchamp, originally written for film but eminently worth a place in the concert repertory. Works of Calder was also written for film, and in this performance Tan sensibly chooses to fit the sound and dialog from the original film in between her performances of 16 minutes of prepared piano music from it. Cage had apparently wanted to do the whole film with percussion and electronics, but had only enough time to do a few minutes this way, hence the prepared piano music, which is not Cage at his best. Tan does her best with the music, but it remains nothing more than a curiosity. Not so One^2, in my opinion one of Cage's best works. In this late piece from 1989--for a single pianist playing between one and four pianos (Tan plays it on three)--the score indicates chords, single notes and tremolos to be played and leaves it up to the performer how to play them (as well as allowing a certain amount of preparation of the pianos). In this performance, Tan's account shows that Cage's musical technique is flexible enough to create what is a conventionally dramatic piano work, with the tension building inexorably over 17 minutes before reaching a powerful climax.
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