Christopher Webber ([log in to unmask]) wrote:

>Does anyone else have a favourite version to compare with the above?

Weeeeeeeeeeellll, this topic has come up before (I'm surprised you didn't
mention some of the versions below) although maybe not here.

I have a copy of the complete thread (some 40+ articles) that appeared in
the rec.music.classical newsgroup some years ago.  I can send that if you
like (I think Dave might find it over long - but it does include discussion
of Bernstein's several recordings - you only seemed aware of the last one,
the VPO is IMHO far more interesting) but here are my two contributions
(and the intervening message which prompted the second).

-----------------
My favourite version is Marc-Andre Hamelin's unbelievable live recording
of Alkan's arrangement for left hand alone - in the cadenza Alkan combines
the main theme of 4'33" contrapuntally with the triumphant final bars of
rest from Music of Changes *and* the silence between the 4th sonata and 2nd
interlude from the Sonatas and Interludes: I can't believe nobody thought
of doing this before.  Hamelin's virtuosity simply silences criticism,
there is not a dry eye in the house at the end of the performance.

Of course there is Felix Weingartner's orchestration, recorded in 1929,
although some people find this rather overblown, and I think Bernstein
did a version with the massed pianos of the VPO - following the example
of Mitropoulos.

Few people realise that Cage himself produced several revisions, including
versions for prepared piano and toy piano, plus a 'contrapuntal' version
for two pianos with optional third piano. I have heard rumours of a
forthcoming recording of this by Rzewski and Hamelin (with either Oppens
or Drury playing the third piano).

I'm not even going to mention the abysmal electric version that Emerson
Lake and Palmer did in the 70s, or the Yanni/John Tesh collaboration which
occupies the second half of the "Live at the Red Rock Acropolis/Dead from
the Neck Up" concert so beloved of PBS......

Deryk Barker
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Has anyone thought about completions of Cage's unfinished score, though?
Such as the various efforts of Eybler, Suessmayr, and Robert Levin?

/James C.S. Liu, MD
---------
Or Deryck Cooke's "performing edition"? Let's face it, Cage left the
work thoroughly sketched out, with only the instrumentation left to be
completed.  Cooke, taking his lead from the examples of "Variations IV",
"Atlas Eclipticalis, "Roaratorio", the Richard Wilhelm translation of the
I Ching and "The Field Guide to North American Mushrooms" has fleshed out
the work and given us a living, breathing whole of which Cage himself would
surely have remarked "I have nothing to say and I am saying it".

There can be no more excuse for playing Cage's incomplete score, than
for playing only the first two movements of Schubert's 8th symphony,
or truncating the final fugue of Bach's Art of Fugue.

Deryk Barker