Word: rzewski
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...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...
...native of Westfield, Massachusetts, Rzewski graduated from Phillips Academy Andover in 1954 and came to Harvard. He studied here under Walter Piston but was also greatly influenced by Christian Wolff, at that time a graduate student in the classics department. Wolff introduced Rzewski to the avant-garde chance techniques of John Cage and Morton Feldman as well as those of Wolff himself, and Rzewski eventually became as famous for performing the works of these composers as for his own music. Upon graduating from Harvard, Rzewski spent two years at Princeton before going to Europe on Fulbright and Ford Foundation grants...
Growing up during the McCarthyist years, Rzewski developed an early loathing for capitalist society that continued to define his political views for years to come. In the '60s and '70s Rzewski's Marxism was so fundamental to him that he hardly wrote a piece without a populist affirmation of some kind. And having early in his career sensed an incompatibility between his political views and any austerity of style, Rzewski gradually adopted a quasi-19th-century romantic idiom with the intention "to establish communication [with], rather than to alienate an audience." His most famous work is a brilliant hour-long...
...works heard Sunday, however, would seem to represent a retreat for Rzewski into purely personal and aesthetic realms, though not a mellowing of his characteristically passionate musical language. None of the three pieces on the program had a discernable social purpose in tow, but Rzewski did make a point of eschewing the traditional tuxedo in favor of a casual shirt and pants...
...eign willing to depart from the ordinary and then give the distinct impression that his subject is not worth writing about. In the middle of a discussion of the problems posed by minimalist composer Philip Glass, he says of the subject of an earlier essay. "A composer like [Frederic] Rzewski can shift facilely from idiom to idiom because, to be blunt, nobody cares what he does, least of all the people...