JOHN CAGE : Complete Piano Music Vol. 9 (Etudes Australes) 2002 / 3CD / FLAC (tracks+.cue), lossless

A primary tenet in John Cage's philosophy lay in his desire to disengage his ego from the process of composition, and many of his works demonstrate his ingenuity in devising means of accomplishing that goal. In his Études australes, and in several other works from the 1970s, he lay starmaps over staff paper and let the location of stars and their relative spatial relationships determine pitches and their relative temporal relationships. The wide placement of the pitches over the keyboard makes it a work that does not fall easily under the fingers under any circumstances, but Cage's instructions make it even more demanding: the score is written on four staves, the top two (approximately the top half of the keyboard) for the right hand, and the bottom two staves (approximately the bottom half of the keyboard) for the left, with the stipulation that the hands not "help" each other by switching to each other's staves for especially wide leaps. That requirement makes it a piece of ferocious difficulty, an element that's not captured by an audio recording in which the listener cannot see the athleticism and virtuosity that's required to pull it off.

In each of its 32 movements, Cage has the pianist depress several keys with rubber wedges so their strings resonate throughout, adding a textural layer of spectral haze. He used the I Ching to determine some musical parameters, but left a significant number of details to the discretion of the performer, including tempos, dynamics, and articulations. This latitude allows for remarkably diverse range of interpretations, particularly in the length of the performances. The recorded versions range from 112 minutes (Claudio Crismani) to 260 minutes (Sabine Liebner). Steffen Schleiermacher's 2002 recording, at 204 minutes, splits the difference, but is closer to the long side. Liebner reasoned that the spatial relations of the star maps should be mirrored precisely in the temporal relationships of the music, so in her version each page of the score lasts precisely the same length, and the result is a performance with little differentiation between movements. Schleiermacher is sensitive to the spatial implications of the score layout, but is not as strictly bound by it; his movements range from four to eight minutes, with discernible variety in the character of the movements. The performance is notable for Schleiermacher's embrace of the composer's assumption that the pianist will use the openness if the notation to personally discover and convey meaning and beauty in the music's execution. MDG unprocessed sound is typically immaculate and detailed but also warmly realistic. A caveat is that the resonating strings are often barely, if at all audible, so the overall impact of the recording misses some of the color and sonic mystery Cage built into the piece. by Stephen Eddins