Fabrizio Ottaviucci pf/elecs Mike Svoboda tbn/elecs Manuel Zurria fl Aldo Campagnari vn Giorgio Casati vc Dario Calderone db Fausto Bongelli, Manuel Zurria, Giovanni Damiani elecs Nextime Ensemble / Stefano Scodanibbio db/elecs Wergo WER6713-2 (66’) Cage’s Concert is revealed again as music of our own time and space In a creative life that was defined by public bust-ups with convention, the 1958 New York Town Hall performance of John Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra marked his first major triumph-cum-scandal. Italian bassist Stefano Scodanibbio’s 2006 performance, featuring Fabrizio Ottaviucci on piano, warmly acknowledges that lineage. The line-up Scodanibbio has harvested from Cage’s modular, open-ended instrumentation reflects, but doesn’t copy, that original Town Hall personnel: a mixed ensemble of wind and strings, but now with added percussion. The spirit of their performance, too, teleports the listener back to 1958 – albeit with bountifully fresh ideas, but without the audience’s cat-whistles and chortles of astonishment so vividly a part of the original record (also issued by Wergo). Concert probes the core of Cageian aesthetics. Each musician reads from an autonomous instrumental part that swims independently through the ensemble, provoking liberated sound plasma that subjective compositional choice would have been unlikely to generate. But not enough to filter out time and place: the occasional swung inflection locates the earlier performance as a product of 1950s New York but the erratic ungroove of this new recording sounds like now. Intense, overlapping randomness pushes the musicians towards physicality and abrupt outbursts of complexity more often associated with improvised means. Each musician places their part with care and diligence. Non-intention yields its own kind of gorgeously untidy accuracy. An exhilarating Radio Music, the open plan Ryoanji and a bass-piano version of the early modal piece Dream all receive sensitive, keenly nuanced performances. Transcriptions of Cage’s Freeman Etudes, originally for violin, lose some of their shrill vulnerability on bass. But you can’t argue with playing as true to itself as Scodanibbio’s. Philip Clark