Boris Berman - Cage: Music For Prepared Piano (2001)

Cage's prepared piano music might be better known by reputation than by acquaintance, but this excellent new release, part of Naxos's praiseworthy ongoing exploration of seminal 20th-century works, should persuade more people to step into the composer's eccentric sound-world. Boris Berman gives a sensitive, closely considered performance of the Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano, written in the late Forties, and seems to relish every sound he makes. The very close recording allows the listener to hear every sound and every resonance in minute detail, and it is the strange beauty of the sounds themselves under Berman's tight control that makes this disc such a joy.