John Cage

The third and final volume of John Cage's complete music for two keyboards by the Pestova/Meyer Piano Duo (Xenia Pestova and Pascal Meyer) gathers three pieces that cover almost the whole of his career. Experiences No. 1 dates from 1945, Winter Music from 1956-57 and Two² from 1989, three years before his death. The label presents Winter Music as a central example of indeterminacy, a score that the performers may treat freely as to time. Two² is one of the Number Pieces of his last years, which Naxos describes as a composition that considers the structure of listening itself.

The session took place on 17 June 2013 at the Espace Découverte of the Philharmonie Luxembourg, with Remy Franck producing and Jarek Frankowski engineering and editing; Samuel Vriezen wrote the booklet notes, and the project was supported by the Philharmonie Luxembourg, the Fonds culturel national Luxembourg and the Fondation Indépendance. Winter Music is a set of separate chords spread across the pages, with only loose indications of how to attack them and when to move on, so that its duration is left to the players. The duo's reading lasts a little over twelve minutes, and its harmonies are often richer than the method would suggest; the label hears the piece as colouristic and resonant however it is paced. Two² takes up 43 minutes: a slow, quiet piece that, as Daniel Coombs put it in Audiophile Audition in 2014, "rarely gets louder than piano", with wide spaces between its events. The short Experiences No. 1, under three minutes, closes the disc in a different world. Coombs describes it as a dance piece conceived for Merce Cunningham, tonal and with an even, ballet-like pulse, and the contrast with the two long indeterminate works is the point of the programme.

Naxos CD 8.559728 in the American Classics series, released in 2014, with the scores published by Edition Peters. It completes the cycle begun on 8.559726 and continued on 8.559727.