Over 40 years ago music played a crucial role in one of this country's most important civil rights struggles: not in the Jim Crow South but in the agricultural fields of California, where the United Farm Workers was organizing laborers into a union for the first time ever. To the "inventors" Scarlatti and Cage we can add and third name - Greilsammer, whose spunk and imagination are most welcome. His performance of Scarlatti's Sonata in D minor, K.213 exquisitely dovetails into Cage's Sonatas XIV & XV, creating a third entity - the fascinating bridge connecting the daring and the delicate in each piece (you can listen to an excerpt here). For Greilsammer the two composers are kindred spirits, both "inventors of sound" - Scarlatti with his radical harmonies and rhythms inspired by flamenco, and Cage with his prepared piano (into which he inserted nuts, bolts and rubber thingamabobs to create a percussion orchestra). Now Greilsammer's back at it, swapping sonatas written 200 years apart by Domenico Scarlatti and John Cage. On the pianist's album Baroque Conversations, from 2012, 18th century masters like Jean-Philippe Rameau sit cheek-by-jowl with modernists like Morton Feldman. Like a crafty DJ, David Greilsammer has a knack for surprising musical juxtapositions.
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