"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.
This program features a wonderful performance by John Cage and Yvar Mikhashoff of Cages Empty Words (1973-1974) with excerpts from Music for Piano, a series begun some 40 years earlier, as well as Cage performing One (1990), both produced and captured by Mode Records for its Mode Records 200 CD, John Cage Edition 41, released in 2009. This performance took place in Buffalo, N.Y., in 1991, coinciding with the premiere performance of Cages Europera 5 at the North American New Music Festival, in which Mikhashoff also performed. Mikhashoff instigated Cages composition of Europera 5, and he was among Cages favorite musicians; his death at the lamentably young age of 52 was mourned by virtually everyone who had the privilege to work with him.
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 106. EVERGREEN
John Cage and Yvar Mikhashoff Perform Cage's Empty Words with Music for Piano and One7
Weekly program featuring conversations between Laura Kuhn, Director of the John Cage Trust, and Cage experts and enthusiasts from around the world.
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Feb. 9, 2023
Produced for Wave Farm in the Hudson Valley in New York.