Search - Frances-Marie Uitti :: John Cage: Works for Cello / Lecture on Nothing

Solo-instrument works by John Cage can be tricky. His scripted indeterminacy (with customarily Cagean instructions such as "any number of players and any means") can mean any number of things, including an invitation to unbridled virtuosity. And while Frances-Marie Uitti is certainly virtuosic--witness her brilliant Giacinto Scelsi: Music for Cello--she smartly takes another tack here. Her renditions of Cage's cello pieces, from the earliest (c. 1950s) 26' 1.1499" for a String Player and Solo for Cello (drawn from the Concert for Piano and Orchestra) to Études Boréales (1978) is stunning in its measuredness. Uitti gets inside the cello, extracting whistly overtones and pileup undertones, collating distant lines into a fabric that embraces interruptions, nonlinearity, and jumping octaves. Rounding out this Cage collection is Uitti's own rendition of the Lecture on Nothing, which occupies 41 minutes of the second CD. It's a great modernist-to-postmodernist look at the construction of a lecture, the stringing of language into something self-consciously coherent. It's one of Cage's best voice pieces, and Uitti does a fine job with it. --Andrew Bartlett