Amadinda’s ambitious Cage percussion project continues with a second release that spans the late 1930s and early 1940s, with three more volumes to follow. I concur with Paul Cook’s suggestion in his review of Volume 1 (type Q2202 in Search Reviews): don’t settle down by the stereo to hear the disc all the way through; it’s best listened to in smaller portions. Having said that, Volume 2 offers an extraordinary array of sounds, from the sibilant pleasures of Third Construction to the hallucinatory slides and drizzles of notes in the Imaginary Landscapes Nos. 2 and 3. Prepared piano, a favorite Cage instrument, figures prominently in this volume as well, with a solo movement in 1943’s Amores and a duet with voice in She is Asleep.
I am very suspicious, however, of the choices made by the ensemble for Credo in US, the longest piece in this volume. The operative word here in voicing my dissent is “choices”. The percussion instruments are meant to be augmented by random radio broadcasts. However, here the selections are far from random, unless serendipity happened to play a major role in choosing–and timing–bits from Tchaikovsky’s Waltz of the Flowers and that annoying synthesizer tune from the first Beverly Hills Cop movie (called “Axel F”, if anyone’s curious). For example, one segment of the Tchaikovsky ends on exactly the same pitch as the percussion. (Someone in the group clearly spent much too much time figuring this all out.) The point is that the musicians did not honor Cage’s intentions, which makes me less than trustful of their other choices.
The sound for the instrumentalists is generally well-balanced yet expansive: the space around the notes makes them pop out that much more clearly. However, in The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs, forever and sunsmell, She is Asleep, and A Flower, the treatment of the vocal soloist, Katalin Károlyi, is a different story altogether. The recording sounds as if she had no individual microphone, or it was placed too far away. I found forever and sunsmell to be completely inaudible until 0:56 unless I turned the volume up to the very highest levels. Károlyi has a beautiful tone, rich and smooth, but her English (or at least what I can hear of it) is poorly enunciated. Don’t judge the series as a whole on the basis of this volume, though: as Volume 1 has shown, this collection offers substantial rewards to the patient listener.
