In addition to being a renowned new music pianist, Margaret Leng Tan is the foremost specialist at the toy piano. She has performed worldwide with her miniature instruments, bestowing them with serious music status in repertoire both written for her and arrangements.

For this disc of attractive yet challenging music, Ms. Tan performs Cage’s classic Suite for Toy Piano plus her arrangement of Cage’s seminal Dream for toy & grand piano (a work that foreshadowed new age music); and her arrangement for voice and toy instruments of a recent song by George Crumb.

Ms. Tan uses no less than six different toy pianos here. Some works find the toy piano performed with other instruments, including grand piano, toy zithers, music boxes, glockenspiels and percussion, with Ms. Tan as a veritable one-person toy orchestra.

Her initial toy piano CD, The Art of the Toy Piano on Philips/Point (1997) was critically acclaimed and a strong cross-over seller. This long awaited follow-up recording combines serious classics (Cage’s Suite) with colorful fun (Griswold), a sultry blues-tango (Twining), drama (Crumb), to haunting meditations (Cage’s Dream and Liben).

“Ms. Leng Tan is well known as an expert interpreter of the music of John Cage and George Crumb. Theirs is difficult and demanding music and Margaret plays this music consistently well. Margaret Leng Tan recorded an earlier disc of toy piano for the Philips label which is long out-of-print. This, her second disc of toy piano, is a long time coming and one of this year’s finest treasures of new music.” - Downtown Music Gallery newsletter, June 11, 2010

Also available on DVD with full video.
Uncompressed Stereo PCM audio in 96khz/24-bit.

Liner notes by Margaret Leng Tan.