New Music for Piano(s) (side A)

1970's New Music for Piano(s) collects then-recent pieces where Yuji Takahashi's piano is the sole instrument.  The first three pieces are performed by solo piano, while Takahashi layers three pianos on the final Earle Brown piece using overdubs.  Xenakis's "Hérma" features his typical use of densely-layered fields, differentiated here by its simple instrumentation.  It's nice to see Roger Reynolds included here, as he sometimes seems to have been overlooked.  His "Fantasy for Pianist" impressively combines genuinely sentimental passages with a more jarring and inventive structural vision.  Takahashi's piece nicely emphasizes his remarkable piano technique, but it's hard to follow and easily the weakest of the four pieces here.  Brown's piece moves furthest from harmonic constructs, and Takahashi's use of technology to create its layering, rather than live performance, captures the piece's character nicely.  The idea of an overdubbed creation, while seeming obvious today, feels ahead-of-its-time when created in 1970.  The piano recordings nicely use the space, and the austere cover design of the series nicely fits the music here.