It’s over 30 years since Cage’s death in 1992, yet opinions remain divided about the American composer’s music and his legacy. Had Cage not gone completely ‘off-piste’ during the 1950s and ’60s, embracing chance, indeterminacy and experimental theatre, perhaps the story would have been rather different. Certainly, the Cage of the 1940s – and the prepared piano works composed during that time – are more immediately accessible and more conceptually graspable than the cryptic Cage of the 1950s.

Yet even the prepared piano remains something of a curiosity for many listeners. Its exotic appeal has often been exaggerated due to regular comparisons with Eastern music in general and the sounds of the Balinese gamelan orchestra in particular. Throw in ubiquitous quips about ‘the well-tampered keyboard’, with eminent figures such as Pierre Boulez admitting a certain ‘amused scepticism’ upon first hearing it, and it’s hardly surprising that the instrument has not always been taken seriously.

The prepared piano remains one of the 20th century’s most significant musical inventions, however, not only in relation to John Cage’s output for the instrument but also for the way in which it changed other composers’ understanding of the piano in general. Bertrand Chamayou’s excellent new recording will do much to reinforce this view.

If Cage’s own legacy for the instrument has often been measured according to his hour-long magnum opus Sonatas and Interludes, composed between 1946 and 1948, some of his most direct and appealing music can be found in the so-called ‘incidental’ works of the early to mid-1940s, often produced at relatively short notice as accompaniments for dancers and choreographers such as Bonnie Bird, Syvilla Fort, Jean Erdman and the composer’s partner and collaborator, Merce Cunningham.

For an instrument designed to mimic the sounds of a percussion ensemble, it goes without saying that rhythmic precision and accurate tempo remain crucial in any convincing account of the repertoire. Here, Chamayou gets it spot on. The brisk tempos applied to The Unavailable Memory of, And the Earth Shall Bear Again and Bacchanale (the latter being Cage’s first composition for the instrument) provide a solid platform from which to foreground important rhythmic nuances such as polyrhythms, polymetres, hemiolas and syncopations. For example, Boris Berman’s take on Mysterious Adventure sounds sluggish in comparison with Chamayou. Hélène Pereira takes the same piece at an even faster pace than Chamayou but suffers at times from rhythmic unevenness.

One senses the dust rising from the dance floor in Chamayou’s energetic renditions, and it’s significant that this recording evolved alongside recent collaborations with dancer and choreographer Élodie Sicard for the eponymous ‘Cage²’ project. These performances are very successful at conjuring up the spirit of the dances for which they were originally designed, especially the propulsive Bacchanale and the autobiographical A Valentine Out of Season, composed for dancers Fort and Cunningham respectively.

Every prepared piano sounds different, as the position of each object (screws, bolts, weather stripping, rubber mutes and so on) along the piano’s strings will have an impact on the resulting sound. It may be a matter of taste, but some end up sounding more convincing than others. In the Name of the Holocaust provides an interesting example. The distant bell-like tolls heard at the beginning of Chamayou’s performance evoke a sense of eeriness and disquiet that resonates particularly well with the composition’s sombre subject matter. These opening chimes sound more like a grandfather clock on Giancarlo Simonacci’s recording, while the same passage just sounds weird on Margaret Leng Tan’s prepared piano. Chamayou’s preparations are excellently judged and ‘well-balanced’ – which may seem a rather odd way of putting it, given that Cage’s intention was to generate a whole gamut of diverse percussive sounds out of the instrument. This is especially the case on the more obviously ‘gamelan-sounding’ pieces, such as Primitive and Daughters of the Lonesome Isle.

Nevertheless, one of the most striking features in Chamayou’s interpretations is the way he uses timbre as a kind of structuring device. Taking again the opening of Mysterious Adventure, the busy rumble of background rhythmic activity on Chamayou’s recording is counterbalanced by a very forthright rhythmic statement of the main theme at around the 40-second mark. This terraced approach towards timbre works well throughout and is especially effective in one of the recording’s standout moments: the six-movement suite The Perilous Night, which compares very favourably with Grete Sultan’s landmark recording of the same piece, and later, in Chamayou’s dynamic performance of And the Earth Shall Bear Again. In truth, however, it’s difficult to single out highlights on ‘Cage²’ because the quality is so consistently high. Flawless.