"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 weeks program is a follow-up to one that aired earlier this month " September 2, to be exact " wherein Kuhn presented Michael Bachs performance of John Cages One8 for solo cello (1991), as captured on the beautiful premiere recording released by Mode Records in 2004. This week well hear John Cages One8 as performed by cellist Karen Krummel simultaneously with his orchestral 108 (also 1991), two works composed and designed to be performed together and heard in what is in effect a cello concerto with the Chance Philharmonic and released on the OgreOgress label in 2010; the recording and mastering were the work of Glenn Freeman, founder of OgreOgress Productions as well as percussionist in this recording, with artwork by Ladislav Hanka, liner notes by George Adams, and design by Heidi Stukkie. Kuhn also includes lengthy quoted materials about Cages number pieces as well as Cages radical ideas about orchestral performance, drawn from an excellent article by Los Angeles Times music critic Mark Swed entitled Cage and Counting: The Number Pieces, included in the metal box catalog for Cages composition for museum, Rolywholyover: A Circus (NY: Rizzoli, 1993).
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 137. EVERGREEN
John Cage, One8 and 108 (1991)
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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Sept. 28, 2023
Produced for Wave Farm in the Hudson Valley in New York.
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