Posted on Fri, Mar. 23, 2007
BY LAWRENCE A. JOHNSON
The goal of most pianists is to perform for sophisticated audiences in the world's most prestigious musical capitals. Frederic Rzewski, however, derives pleasure from playing for ``people who really don't know what's going on.''
''I enjoy concerts in little places where nobody has any idea who I am,'' Rzewski says from Brussels. ``If it's good, and they like it, they'll tell you so. And if they don't like it, they'll tell you so. That's the most useful situation for me. That's where you learn the truth.''
Rzewski (CHEF-ski) opens the 10th season of the Miami International Piano Festival with a rare South Florida appearance Monday night in a duo-recital with Emanuele Arciuli.They will team up for excerpts from Rzewski's North American Ballads, and Arciuli will perform Rzewski's Four Pieces as well as music of Liszt, Debussy, Fred Hersch and Chick Corea.
Yet most interest will center on Rzewski's solo stand when he tackles his The People United Will Never Be Defeated! Not only is the set of 36 variations one of the most tortuously difficult modern piano works, it's also quite possibly the greatest set of variations ever written by an American composer for any instrument.
In many ways, Rzewski is the consummate musical outsider: an American expatriate, long resident in Belgium, he is a committed man of the left in an apolitical era for most classical artists and one who takes a dismissive view of fame and fortune.
''Things have changed since the days of Mozart and Beethoven,'' Rzewski, 68, says. ``I don't understand the classical music scene. I don't understand how it works.''
Rzewski's music and performances are all about communication and establishing a direct, honest connection with as wide an audience as possible.
In many ways, Rzewski's works hail from a strain of American 20th-century musical populism, rooted in folk material and influenced by a pronounced political view, equal parts Woody Guthrie and Ruth Crawford Seeger.
Yet there's nothing banal or condescending about Rzewski's treatment of his source material. Indeed, the audacious writing, unexpected harmonic turns and structural command are striking, distinctive and quite extraordinary.
In his four North American Ballads, Rzewski transcends the naive folk material (like the songs Down by the Riverside and Which Side Are You On?), taking it into remarkably sophisticated and surprising harmonic regions.
Rzewski's compositional skill can be heard at its finest and most idiosyncratic in his celebrated tour de force, The People United Will Never Be Defeated!
The work takes its theme from the Chilean song ¡El Pueblo Unido Jamás Será Vencido! by Sergio Ortega, which became an anthem of sorts for Chile's pro-Allende forces in the 1970s.
''The idea of that movement was to find a way of making music that made some kind of continuum between popular music and the classics,'' Rzewski says. ``If you look at Sergio's song, you can see it's very classical and actually similar to the Paganini theme on which so many composers wrote variations.
``The basic idea of the song is the idea of unity. And so I tried to develop that idea in different ways, by bringing in folk music as well as the classics.''
Rzewsi wrote The People United in just two months in 1971 for pianist Ursula Oppens. Yet despite its origins in left-wing political sloganeering, the work is as rigorously structured as a Bach chorale.
The theme of Ortega's song is exactly 36 measures, followed by 36 variations. The set's six ''stages'' veer far afield and also throw in the Italian revolutionary song Bandiera Rossa as well as Hans Eisler's 1932 anti-fascict ode, Solidaritatslied. The soloist has the option to insert a bravura cadenza at the work's climax before the triumphant reprise of the song at the coda.
Far from a dry or forbidding piece of hoary musical agitprop, The People United is one of the most vibrant, anarchic and compelling piano works written in decades. In addition to the extreme technical demands, its range of expression is astounding, from the sardonic to the meditative, roving from hushed minimalism to blazing virtuosity and often, extraordinary beauty.
Arciuli, with whom Rzewski has collaborated several times, believes The People United to be a masterpiece. He also has great affection for Rzewki's music across the board. ''I'm attracted by the complexity of the thoughts, the challenging and virtuoso piano writing and the revolutionary strength of his expression,'' Arciuli writes in an email from Italy.
``The challenge in that music is to join many different styles, different approaches. The risk is that the music sounds like a musical patchwork, yet despite its variety, Rzewski's piano music is very coherent.''
The composer is wryly modest about his playing. Complimented on the performances in his 7-CD BMG/RCA box set, Rzewski Plays Rzewski, he says. ``I admire your patience for listening to it.''
He expresses dissatisfaction with his playing of the Sonata, believing it's much too slow but is pleased with his electrifying performance of The People United. Rzewski blazes through the massive work with startling ferocity in a performance that was, amazingly, recorded in a single take.
''It's a long piece, so it involves a certain amount of physical fatigue,'' Rzewski says. ``And you should be able to hear that fatigue and the performer getting tired. Otherwise it would be a falsification. It has mistakes in it, and we decided to leave them in.''
The composer came of age at a time when a back-to-basics approach was taking hold of the international music scene. Shostakovich was his hero, and while Rzewski was involved in electronic music and the hardcore serial movements of the 1960s, he saw that brand of academic music was fast becoming a dead end.
''In the 1970s, there was a feeling shared by many composers -- both politically inclined and otherwise -- that the avante-garde language had cut itself off from the audience,'' he says. ``So it was time to deal with this question, or else the composers were going to write themselves out of existence.''
The reaction against the astringent trends of the 1950s and 1960s inevitably brought forth more user-friendly movements from minimalism to neo-Romanticism. Yet Rzewski was more influenced by European modernists who found renewal in folk material, though his mining of folk elements was ''much more haphazard'' than that of Europeans like Berio. ''I wasn't being sytematic,'' he said. ``I was just looking around for different ideas.''
Though he is considered a highly political artist, Rzewski tends to downplay the effect of politics on his music. ''I don't deny there is a certain relevance, especially with people of my generation who came to maturity in the '60s,'' he says. ''If you were an artist or a composer at that time, you couldn't possibly avoid these issues. You had to take some kind of stand one way or the other.'' Asked whether he still considers himself a Marxist, Rzewski laughs heartily. 'I keep seeing that in the Wikipedia. It says I'm an `unapologetic Marxist.' It doesn't say what kind of a Marxist: Harpo or Groucho or what.''
But even if that or some other label fits, ''what difference would it make?'' he asks. ``I don't see what importance it has in the case of a musician. I mean, I could see if an economist or a historian is a Marxist. I don't think anybody stops to think about what that could possibly mean in the case of a composer.''
For someone with one of the most distinctive and idiosyncratic styles of any living American composer, Rzewski says he has no clue about how to describe his music and remains baffled by the creative process.
``I'm still groping. I've never settled on any one kind of aesthetic approach. It boggles my mind. I don't even like to think about it. I used to worry about whether I was doing the right thing. Now I just try to get it down on paper and not worry about whether it's right or wrong.
``I mean, for an artist, it's not important to know what you're doing. The important thing is to do it. And maybe other people can make sense of it.''
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