John Cage: As It Is Alexei Lubimov & Natalia Pschenitschnikova

• 1Dream08:28
• 2The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs03:02
• 3The Unavailable Memory Of03:29
• 4A Flower03:31
• 5Music for Marcel Duchamp06:20
• 6Experiences No. 203:33
• 7A Room02:11
• Three Songs
• 8Three Songs: I. Twenty Years After00:30
• 9Three Songs: II. Is It As It Was00:56
• 10Three Songs: III. At East and Ingredients01:23
• Two Pieces For Piano
• 11Two Pieces for Piano: I05:03
• 12Two Pieces for Piano: II05:19
• Five Songs
• 13Five Songs: 1. Little Four Paws01:42
• 14Five Songs: 2. Little Christmas Tree03:37
• 15Five Songs: 3. in Just01:11
• 16Five Songs: 4. Hist Whist00:59
• 17Five Songs: 5. Tumbling Hair01:06
• 18Prelude for Meditation01:26
• 19She Is Asleep07:49
• 20Nowth Upon Nacht01:22
• 21Dream, Var.08:25
• Total Runtime01:11:22

Info for John Cage: As It Is

A fresh approach to one of contemporary composition’s most iconoclastic and inventive figures, issued on the occasion of John Cage’s 100th birthday. Early Cage is the subject here, strikingly original songs and piano pieces from the 1930s and 1940s. Songs in which Cage set words by writers whose vision was as independent as his own – James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, E. E. Cummings. Piano pieces which evoke other worlds, and dreams. As Paul Griffiths writes, “The music exists in singing that has a raw, living edge, and it exists in piano tone that can be utterly simple and utterly remarkable. There is also a third presence, that of the producer, bringing forward the extraordinary resonances that come from Lubimov’s piano, with preparation or without.” Recorded December 2011 in Zürich.

In time for the John Cage centenary here is a wonderful and fresh account of the great iconoclast’s music that conveys the playfulness, the serenity and the sense of freedom that animated it from the outset. This is, mostly, early Cage. Music from the 1940s primarily but also settings of poems by Gertrude Stein and E. E. Cummingss from the 1930s as well as ”Nowth upon nacht” a late entry from 1984, a composition in memory of Cathy Berberian for which Cage returned to the same page of James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake” which had inspired his “Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs” in 1942.

Our interpreters here: Alexei Lubimov, pianist, and Natalia Pschenitschnikova, singer. As Paul Griffiths writes in the liner notes “the music exists between them and the composer. It exists in singing that has a raw living edge and it exists in piano tone that can be utterly simple and utterly remarkable.”

Several of the pieces featured prepared piano, Cage’s particular innovation, effectively transforming the grand piano into makeshift Gamelan orchestra, conjuring gonglike sonorities from its harp of strings by the simple expedient of adding nuts, bolts, screws and pieces of wood and rubber weatherstripping. “There is also a third presence”, Griffiths notes, “that of the producer [Manfred Eicher] bringing forward the extraordinary resonances that come from Lubimov’s piano, with preparation or without.”

Lubimov was one of the artists who consistently championed Cage’s work in Russia from the 1960s onwards. He gave the first monographic concert of his music at the Moscow Conservatoire in 1976, “to the fury of the academic professors” as the pianist recalls in an performer’s note here.

Alexei Lobimov, piano & prepared piano Natalia Pschenitschnikova, voice

“As It Is” was recorded at the DRS Radio Studio Zürich in December 2011.

No biography found.

Booklet for John Cage: As It Is