mode 221
(1-CD, or high-resolution DVD)
(Region 0, NTSC, PCM digital stereo)
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(Region 0, NTSC, PCM digital stereo) |
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Margaret Leng TanSHE HERSELF ALONE The Art of the Toy Piano 2 (CD/DVD) John Cage Eric Griswold John Cage For this disc of attractive yet challenging music, Ms. Tan performs Cage’s classic “Suite for Toy Piano” plus her arrangement of Cage’s seminal “Dream” for toy & grand piano (a work that foreshadowed new age music); and her arrangement for voice and toy instruments of a recent song by George Crumb. Ms. Tan uses no less than six different toy pianos here. Some works find the toy piano performed with other instruments including grand piano, toy zithers, music boxes, glockenspiels and percussion, with Ms. Tan as a veritable one-person toy orchestra. Her initial toy piano CD, “The Art of the Toy Piano” on Philips/Point (1997) was critically acclaimed and a strong cross-over seller. This long awaited follow-up recording combines serious classics (Cage’s “Suite”) with colorful fun (Griswold), a sultry blues-tango (Twining), drama (Crumb), to haunting meditations (Cage’s “Dream” and Liben). Also available on DVD with full video. Original 96khz/24-bit recording. Liner notes by Margaret Leng Tan. Filmed in high-definition video. Uncompressed Stereo PCM audio in 96khz/24-bit. ALSO BY MARGARET LENG TAN ON MODE:
Reviews: Ms. Leng Tan is well known as an expert interpreter of the music of John Cage and George Crumb. Theirs is difficult and demanding music and Margaret plays this music consistently well. For the past 17 years Ms. Leng Tan has been on a mission: playing, collecting and placing the toy piano in the spotlight for more serious consideration. Ms. Leng Tan describes her long odyssey of finding music composed for the toy piano or getting composers to write for such an under-recognized instrument as well as working with other toy instruments. John Cage was the first composer to write for the toy piano, so it makes complete sense to begin this disc with his “Suite for Toy Piano” written in 1948. With just nine (white) notes employed, Cage’s work is filled with delicate grace, lush, humorous, a child-like sense of wonder, like a miniature ballerina spinning elegantly. Cage’s “Dream” was also written in 1948 and is rather Satie-like with somber minimal repetition. Eric Griswold’s “Old MacDonald’s Yellow Submarine” features toy & prepared pianos, music box & bicycle bells & horn. I like the way the prepared (broken-sounding) piano & toy piano sound together, like a sad, distant memory of riding on a merry-go-round gone wrong. Toby Twining’s “An American in Buenos Aires” was written for toy & regular pianos. It has elements of a tango & the blues, the melody is both sad and lovely, the blend between both pianos is just exquisite. Perhaps my favorite piece is George Crumb’s “Put My Little Shoes Away” which features toy piano, toy percussion quartet & Margaret’s rather child-like voice. Strange & wonderful with slightly twisted percussion & piano floating together. Jerome Kitzke’s “The Animist Child” is even stranger still. Written for toy piano & voice (an invented language), it includes hand claps, foot stomps and banging intensely on the toy piano. Margaret sounds like a boisterous child gone mad, yet the piece somehow works in an oddly disarming way. Ross Bolleter has a dozen discs of ruined pianos, most often found outside and slowly disintegrating. “Hymn to Ruin” features Margaret on ruined toy & ruined regular pianos. There is something quite haunting about this piece as the two broken pianos interweave ominously around one another like ancient ghosts of former civilizations that have abandoned their toys and pianos to the trash-heap of history. The title piece was written by Laura Liben and it is performed on toy piano and toy psaltery. A psaltery is a stringed musical instrument of the harp or the zither family. This piece is eerie, solemn with the strings somewhat bent, like a toy box slowly wearing down until it disappears. Margaret Leng Tan recorded an earlier disc of toy piano for the Philips label which is long out-of-print. This, her second disc of toy piano, is a long time coming and one of this year’s finest treasures of new music.
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