Sabine Liebner - Cage: Music for Piano 1-84 (2007)

John Cage: Music for Piano 1-84 (or 85, if you count an appended piece for piano and electronics not composed until 1962; the main work dates from 1952-1956) is a cycle of piano pieces closely related to his Music of Changes (1951). The main difference, if one cares to observe it, is in terms of instrumentation -- Music for Piano 4-19 and 21-84 are scored for "piano, or any number of pianos." Pianist Sabine Liebner opts to perform this unwieldy, two-hour-long cycle on solo piano in German label NEOS' ambitious John Cage: Music for Piano 1-84.
Like Music of Changes, the 84 pieces in the cycle, ranging from the longest (Music for Piano 2 at four and a half minutes) to many tiny miniatures only a few seconds long, were composed through chance procedures. Amplification of imperfections in the music paper Cage was writing on was the main method of determining pitch; duration, dynamics, and other parameters were arrived at through a mixture of other methods, coin tosses and the use of playing cards, yarrow sticks, and so forth. Cage was consciously attempting to bring into the world music that, as much as possible, generated itself without his intervention, and just like everything else he tried, the result sounds just like -- John Cage.
Playing such music is a lot more difficult than it sounds on the other end. With his earliest chance derived compositions, such as Music for Piano 1 here, Cage discovered that his process was very work intensive and yielded results that were denser than what he most likely desired; these pieces were intended for use in dance performances, where a certain amount of negative space was desirable. By adding silence into the mix, Cage achieved the lightness of texture that he wanted. This calls for extreme concentration on the part of the performer; you have to be patient enough to wait out the long silences Cage calls for and put the right note in the right place in a texture in which predictable patterns are completely absent. In this respect, Liebner does an admirable job in this set and she plays close attention to the widely ranging dynamics in this long work, most often assigned to single pitches, rather than passages. NEOS' close, nicely atmospheric recording captures Liebner's playing in its essence without extraneous noises in music often so quiet that the breathing of the pianist would be in danger of showing up in the finished product.
None of this, of course, answers the essential question, should you listen? Absolutely. Once you are past the uncharacteristically dense Music for Piano 1, the music opens up into its regular, spatial realm and this unobtrusive, graceful, and surprisingly pianistic music can make for a great accompaniment to late-night reading or any other instance where one wants music that fills a space, but does not take over.