As pianist Alexei Lubimov reveals in a short memoir included in the liner notes, the origins of this quietly haunting disc might be traced back to 1988, when John Cage visited Russia as part of the US delegation to the international contemporary music festival held in Leningrad. Lubimov and his contemporaries were already performing Cage, but a few weeks after that visit a five-hour concert of his works was staged in Moscow involving a new generation of musicians, one of whom was the soprano Natalia Pschenitschnikova, who shares this disc of early songs and piano pieces with Lubimov.

Their selection ranges from the Three Songs to words by Gertrude Stein of 1933, composed before Cage went to study with Schoenberg in Los Angeles, to pieces from the 1940s, such as the Joyce setting The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs, as well as She Is Asleep, Cage's only work for voice and prepared piano, and the unaccompanied Experiences 2, to a poem by EE Cummings.

Between the songs come some of the early piano and prepared piano pieces often, like Meditation and The Unavailable Memory Of, built out of just a handful of pitches, and many of them composed for dances by Cage's partner, Merce Cunningham. But what emerges most forcefully is the precision of Cage's aural imagination, whether it's in his use of modal inflections in his vocal writing or in the minute care with which he specifies the objects to be inserted into the piano strings for a prepared piano. Nothing is generalised, and the performances by Lubimov and Pschenitschnikova take immense care over every nuance, without ever sacrificing any of the sense of the music's shape.