REVIEW: John Cage and Erik Satie are paired together in a thought-provoking album by Luisa Guembes-Buchanan

LUISA GUEMBES-BUCHANAN

JOHN CAGE REMEMBERED

Del Aguila Records DA 30626

4 STARS

By John Evans

Peruvian pianist Luisa Guembes-Buchanan’s discography traces an established path: some Beethoven, Scarlatti, Schubert and Schumann. However, she’s not afraid to strike out, as witness her albums of rarely recorded sonatas by ETA Hoffman. In this spirit of discovery she brings us her latest release pairing Erik Satie’s little-known Vexations with John Cage’s Chess Pieces.

What’s their connection? In fact, Cage rescued Vexations from obscurity in 1949 and arranged its premiere in 1963. Comprising 60 short but deceptively simple pieces and composed in around 1894, Satie had insisted it was to be played 840 times in succession. Cage suggested this repetition would eventually reveal the work’s qualities to the otherwise bored listener but even on just one play-through, it’s entrancing.

Invited, in 1944, to paint a picture on the theme of chess, Cage included miniature scores in each square of his board amounting to 22 musical ‘units’ of 12 bars each. Like Vexations, to fully appreciate it, Chess Pieces demands a willingness to ‘zone out’. Happily, Guembes-Buchanan’s sensitive touch enables just that.