Classical Listening by Haskins Rob;

Author:Haskins, Rob;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

ASLSP

Sabine Liebner, piano

Neos 11042—65 minutes (2010)

The title is an abbreviation for “as slowly as possible” and refers to a quotation from Cage’s beloved James Joyce: “Soft morning city! Lsp!” The composition comprises eight separate movements, each two systems long; the position of the noteheads and stems indicates where the sounds occur in time, and Cage directs the performer to realize a correspondence between space and time “so that the music ‘sounds’ as it ‘looks.’” Written in 1985, ASLSP recalls the sound world of his Music for _____series: single notes and chords of all sorts (including a dominant seventh chord) occurring at irregular intervals.

Sabine Liebner’s performance is very slow indeed, so that the music is shot through with silence. She varies the dynamics in unpredictable ways, and she plays with a good variety of tone color. I’ll nitpick and say that she doesn’t respect Cage’s remark about effecting a correspondence between space and time. Each piece should take more or less the same amount of time to play, but here the shortest movement is 5:48 and the longest 10:29—much too wide a variance. (Cage’s performance notes don’t give the pianist the same kind of license as he does for Etudes Australes.) But Liebner’s performance is the longest one in the Cage discography; no serious Cage enthusiast should be without it.

May/June 2011

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