John Cage: Early Piano Music (ECM)
This CD brings together the wonderful piano pieces that Cage wrote in the 1930s and 1940s, when he was feeling his way towards the anarchic “chance music” that made him notorious. The earliest ones are severe and angular, sounding like proper modern music; the later ones have an innocent air. Henck, though, is adept at playing both styles.
The one piece that doesn’t quite come off is Ophelia, an uncharacteristically dramatic work that could have done with a more full-blooded performance. But everything else is marvellous. The drifting gentleness of In a Landscape is