When pianist Aki Takahashi, known for her beautiful interpretations of contemporary classical composers (especially Morton Feldman), was approached by Toshiba/EMI to record an album of Beatles songs, she instead decided to commission a wide range of composers to write their interpretations of the Lennon/McCartney songbook. A fantastic idea, although the results are somewhat more staid than one would have hoped. A number of the pieces are surprisingly straightforward, more or less attractive rearrangements of the songs. Others, like Frederic Rzewski's version of "Give Peace a Chance," struggle mightily with fairly limited thematic material and fail to build a satisfying new structure. The tunes are centered around John Cage's "The Beatles 1962-1970," which uses snippets of dozens of songs that are overdubbed but pieced together in a manner that sounds more arbitrary than sublimely random. More successful are Alvin Curran's prickly deconstruction of "When I'm 64," Carl Stone's richly imagined "She Said, She Said," and especially Peter Garland's "Goddess of Liberty -- You've Got to Hide Your Love Away." This last comes closest to taking the pith of the song chosen and composing a small fantasy on it while only brushing up against the original melody, which hovers off to the side in a ghostly fashion. When, toward the end of the piece, the theme is almost rendered, the effect is quite beautiful. In sum, Hyper Beatles is a fascinating experiment and worth hearing even if it falls slightly short of expectations. ~ Brian Olewnick, All Music Guide
