Cage: Four Walls

Cage Four Walls Alexei Lubimov (piano); with Marianne Pousseur (soprano) Fuga Libera FUG793 55:13 mins

Cage composed Four Walls in 1944 – the year Alexei Lubimov was born. Forty-four years later Cage visited Moscow, where he and the pianist ‘drank vodka and ate dandelions’ together. It’s a number synchronicity that would have tickled the composer, whose unusually expressive ‘dance-play’ score is well served on this live recording from 1994.

A collaboration with writer-choreographer and soon-to-be life partner Merce Cunningham, the drama concerns a dysfunctional family, their ‘Nearpeople’ and further ‘Mad-Ones’. Cage’s response is a solo piano whose simple, diatonic material encompasses a gamut of moods from Satie-esque wistful melody to insistent, stabbing chords.

Between the poles, Alexei Lubimov finds an introspection and immediacy that makes the scattered lengthy silences as disruptive as the sounds they appear to contradict, leaving the listener as it were alone with the dancers’ shuffling and breathing. It’s a suitably unsettling experience, heightened by the brief, yearning contribution of solo soprano Marianne Pousseur.

Whether Cage felt personal resonance with the subject is unknown (at the time, he was heading for divorce from his wife Xenia). But it’s tempting to muse on possible life parallels in Cunningham’s descriptions of ‘the deep black nightingale turned willowy/by love’s tossed treatment.’

Steph Power