Philip Thomas’s survey of the piano music of Christian Wolff may not be entirely comprehensive, but it spans almost the whole of the American experimentalist’s career as a composer, from his Cageian pieces of the 1950s to the explosion of creativity in the last decade. The earliest work here is For Prepared Piano of 1951, full of obsessive repetitions and irregular silences; the most recent, the set of 20 Tiny Preludes composed in 2010, in which many of the musical parameters – tempi, dynamics, even the choice of clef – are left to the performer’s discretion. The first disc is framed by Thomas’s two utterly different realisations of Wolff’s For Pianist, of 1959, which he calls “one of the most extreme instances of indeterminate music to have emerged from that period.” The second disc is occupied by the 96 pieces that make up Long Piano (Peace March 11) from 2005, a series of fragments that are sometimes separated by pauses, sometimes seamlessly joined together. It’s a fascinating collection, by turns beautiful and frustrating, to which Thomas is the perfect, committed guide.
