Search - Cage, Giancarlo Cardini :: John Cage: Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano / Cardini

Cardini brings the gentleness and introspection he knows

scarecrow | Chicago, Illinois United States | 05/13/2000

(5 out of 5 stars)

"The Sonatas and Interludes I'd venture to guess is the most recorded work in the Cage edifice. It is the most traditionally beautiful, originally written to accompany dance, at least the idea of the prepared piano. This is a piano where you place erasers, screws of varying sizes(woodscrews work best) and shapes,the result sounds like pings,clings,thuds,jabs,broken sounds,sometimes the sound may remind you of a Gamelan orchestra.Cage is impeccable in including a diagram table as introductory notes to the score, providing the length the screw must be placed from the peg on the inside of the piano. This renders the resonance perfect. It is odd that not much of his other prepared is played with any degree of frequency as these works, nor has any other composer contributed to this genre as profoundly as these works. It is a genre that kind a died a quiet peaceful death. So you might enquire why do we need another recording of these works? , well each performer brings their own emotive world to these pieces. You cannot play these works with great impassioned abandon, Cage was very clear on the rhythmic displacement,utilizing simple numeric proportions, and passion has no place in these works anyway with their private gentle sound. All the emotion is inside the arrestingly beautiful sound world Cage produces here. Cardini a composer himself writes primarily piano music and is instrospective mysterious music, very gentle,passive and beautiful, just like early Cage. He is no stranger to performance art and the high art of avant-garde pianism. His repertoire is indeed vast,with a healthy dose of Cage mentor people as Erik Satie. He brings all this to these Sonatas and Interludes, very restrained and passive allowing the pure beauty to work on us."