"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.
Russell Hartenberger and Garry Kvistad are long-time members of NEXUS, a quartet of master percussionists internationally revered for virtuosity and innovation and for making extraordinary music with the broadest array of percussion instruments imaginable. The ensemble is recognized quite simply as one of the most influential percussion ensembles to have emerged in the post-war period. NEXUS has participated in several Cage programs at Bard College since the John Cage Trust joined its ranks in 2007: the first “John Cage at Bard College Symposium” in 2009, where they were joined by Jason Treuting of So Percussion and Bard College’s own Frank Corliss, and again in 2012, Cage’s Centennial Year, when they performed in an amazing staged performance of the John Cage/Kenneth Patchen 1942 CBS radio play, The City Wears a Slouch Hat, in a program entitled “John Cage: On & Off the Air.” And in 2014, Garry Kvistad, a long-time resident of New York’s Hudson Valley, graced us with a stunning solo performance of Cage’s 27’ 10.554 for a percussionist (1956), appearing within a chance-determined musical collage of five related works Cage composed between 1953 and 1956, in a program entitled “The Ten Thousand Things.”
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 125. EVERGREEN
Russell Hartenberger, Garry Kvistad
Weekly program featuring conversations between Laura Kuhn, Director of the John Cage Trust, and Cage experts and enthusiasts from around the world.
00:55:33
1
June 22, 2023
Produced for Wave Farm in the Hudson Valley in New York.
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