Sometimes recognized as a virtuoso pianist, sometimes as a composer in his own right, Frederic Rzewski is one of the most consistent, creative personalities of the last few decades. He is capable of exhilarating energy, performing his long piano compositions as to develop insightful ideas about the role of artists in a broader socio-historical context. The Sixties took Rzewski to Europe performing Stockhausen, Boulez, Cage, Bussotti, Kagel and many other composers as well as co-founding the influential electronic ensemble MEV with Alvin Curran and Richard Teitelbaum. Around 1969, he composed “Les Moutons de Panurge,” a radical experiment with additive melodic formulas labeled after as minimalism. A few years after this piece, Rzewski balanced minimal accented cells with political texts in the remarkable “Attica” and “Coming Together”. During the seventies, he was deeply concerned about problems relating to crises in musical theory, sociopolitical questions and aesthetic language. Regarding all of this, Rzewski’s music has coped with many tensions and, in his own words, “it seemed to me (that) there was no reason why the most difficult and complex formal structures could not be expressed in a form which could not be understood by a wide variety of listeners”, something for which he was criticized for. (Daniel Varela)
Frederic Rzewski – Coming Together (Opus One, 1973)…
(Thanks very much to Incessant Noise blog for this rip!)
