Word: pianists
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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SCOTT JOPLIN, JAMES SCOTT AND JOSEPH Lamb may have been the Big Three composers of the ragtime era, but there were a host of others, many of them (yes!) women. Twelve are represented on FLUFFY RUFFLE GIRLS, an irresistible CD by pianist Virginia Eskin (Northeastern). May Aufderheide, probably the best known of the dozen, showed with infectious rags like The Thriller! that she could crack knuckles with the big boys. Also noteworthy are two elegiac rags by the contemporary composer Judith Lang Zaimont, which prove there's life in the old genre yet. Eskin captures all the insouciant charm...
...composer and pianist Frederic Rzewski '58 returned to his alma mater Sunday evening for a solo recital in Paine Hall. Rzewski performed three piano pieces he has written in the last two years, demonstrating both a rich creative arsenal and uncompromising keyboard virtuosity...
...Profundis" (1991), which Rzewski performed next, is a setting of eight paragraphs from a letter written in prison by Oscar Wilde; the pianist reads aloud and plays simultaneously. The text is an earnest and profound metaphysical meditation which Rzewski subjected to an affected, overinflected reading and interspersed with voiced breathing and noises of laughter and singing that bordered on the maniacal. Rzewski accompanied one passage by slapping himself and drumming his fingers on the closed piano lid, another (about the imperfections of governments) with the squeaking of a toy horn. In these instances the effect was derisive, whatever the intention...
Frederic Rzewski has one of the most uninhibitedly creative musical minds around, and he is a spectacular pianist. The three pieces heard Sunday were more than sufficient indication of this, providing their audience with an experience not likely to be soon forgotten...
...break with Sony was a watershed. The pianist cut his 100-concerts-a-year schedule in half and moved from his West Side Manhattan apartment to a quiet bungalow nestled in the woods near New Paltz. Last March he signed a contract with MusicMasters that will allow him to record the Germanic repertory he loves, particularly Bach and Beethoven. "Now everything is balanced," he says. "And I think that people finally are looking at me as just a musician, you know, not as a political hero or specialist in Russian music." For Feltsman, the cold war has finally ended...