In love with every sound: new nice reviews of Sonatas&Interludes for prepared piano by Cage

Despite the hot summer and the three years since the recording of Sonatas&Interludes for prepared piano by John Cage was released by Neuma Records, a couple of nice reviews came up during the last months. 
I am always pleased when someone takes the time of listening to my music and grateful to read such nice words. Some extracts below and the complete reviews in the links.

PARIS-MOVE, August 18th, 2026
Frankie Pfeiffer
, Editor in chief

Agnese Toniutti and the Ghost in the Machine: Inside Her Recording of Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes
Some performances feel like an act of channelling rather than interpretation, as though the performer has stopped standing between the composer and the listener and has instead become a kind of conduit. Agnese Toniutti’s recording of John Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano is one of those recordings. […] it’s more like listening in on a private conversation between a pianist and a composer’s ghost. It’s a fascinating album!

[…]Toniutti’s choice throughout this recording is restraint in service of wonder. […]Toniutti’s version of “right” is unhurried, luminous, and deeply attentive to the grain of every individual sound. […] an interpreter who treats every unconventional score as an invitation to research as much as to perform. […] Across this recording, you can hear Toniutti sitting comfortably inside that contradiction, never trying to smooth it away. […] there’s a spaciousness to these performances that never tips into slackness. 

The Sonatas and Interludes has been recorded many times, and it doesn’t need Toniutti’s version to secure its place in the twentieth-century canon, but what her recording offers instead is a genuinely distinct relationship to the material: an interpreter whose entire artistic practice has been built around investigating what sound does inside a composition, applied to the one solo-piano work most explicitly designed to force that question. The result […] feels like an artist who has found, in Cage’s transformed instrument, a subject worthy of everything she already does best.
This is a recording to sit with rather than skim, one where the space between the notes carries as much information as the notes themselves, and where Cage’s spirit of patient, curious attentiveness feels, for nearly an hour, genuinely alive in someone else’s hands. Do I have to say it again? It’s a fascinating album!

Piano Factory 35 – La Folia Music Review, March 2026.
Grant Chu Covell

Just when you might think there’s nothing more to say about the prepared piano, then comes Cage’s classic vividly captured. A quick spot check with older performances on the shelves (Ajemian, Tenney, Tilbury, Henck) confirms this release’s admirable clarity (Ok, Ajemian’s is from 1951). It sounds as if we’re in the piano. There are distinct colors when the pedal is down, and Toniutti’s fast passages render cleanly. This is never mushy or blurry. Toniutti appears to be in love with every sound.