"All Things Cage" is a weekly program featuring conversations between Laura Kuhn, Director of the John Cage Trust, and Cage experts and enthusiasts from around the world. If youd like to propose a guest or a topic for a future program, write directly to Laura at lkuhn@johncage.org.Laura Kuhn presents the first recording of John Cages Europera 5, preceded by her reading Recollections of the Premiere Performance by Yvar Mikhashoff. This recording of Europera 5 was produced by Brian Brandt and released on the Mode Records label as Mode 36 in 1995, with performers Yvar Mikhashoff, Martha Herr, Gary Burgess, Jan Williams, and Don Metz. Europera 5 is the last and most diminutive of Cages operas " preceded by Europeras 1 & 2 (1984-1987) and Europeras 3 & 4 (1991) " and was instigated by pianist Yvar Mikashoffs desire for a small, more practical and portable, and more easily performed work in the series, which had its premiere in Buffalo at the North American New Musical Festival on April 12, 1991.
Today's program is a conversation between Laura Kuhn and Anthony de Mare, one of the worlds foremost champions of contemporary music, known for entrepreneurial performance projects that expand the repertoire and the audience for contemporary music, including the speaking-singing pianist genre that he helped pioneer over 30 years ago with the premiere of Frederic Rzewskis De Profundis in 1992. We break tradition a bit, as after some conversation about his experiences with John Cage and Cages colleagues Yvar Mikhashoff, Meredith Monk, and Frederic Rzewski, we launch into deep discussion about his most recent recording project, Liaisons: Re-Imagining Sondheim from the Piano, which celebrates the music of Stephen Sondheim through the commissioned re-imaginings of composers from across the musical spectrum. Far afield from Cage, perhaps, but maybe only superficially, as the inclusive design and determined passion of de Mares massive now two-pronged recording project would surely have warmed Cages heart. To balance out our meanderings, we close tonights program with selections from an early Koch CD, entitled Pianos and Voices, which features works by John Cage and Meredith Monk, with de Mare performing pianos and voices. Anthony speaks a bit about this recording and the works chosen for it but suffice it to say here that Cage works included on this CD span more than four decades, dating from 1935 to 1984. At the programs close we listen to three pieces: Two Pieces for Piano (1935; rev. 1974), The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs (1942), and Nowth Upon Nacht (1984).
The late Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Kenneth Silverman once described his "Begin Again: A Biography of John Cage" (Knopf, 2012) as the hardest book hed ever written. This was because, as he put it, pick up any rock and theres John Cage! Indeed, Cage was not only a world-renowned composer, numbering among his compositions the still notoriously tacet 433, but a ground-breaking poet, a philosopher, a chess master who studied with Marcel Duchamp, a macrobiotic chef, a devotee of Zen Buddhism, a prolific visual artist, and an avid and pioneering mycologist. He was also life partner to the celebrated American choreographer, Merce Cunningham, for nearly half a century, and thus well known in the world of modern dance. Episode 121. EVERGREEN
Tom Moore
Weekly program featuring conversations between Laura Kuhn, Director of the John Cage Trust, and Cage experts and enthusiasts from around the world.
00:57:59
1
May 25, 2023
Produced for Wave Farm in the Hudson Valley in New York.
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