Rzewski, Frederic (1938-2021)

[Richard Barrett]

I just returned home from the airport (I can't quite believe I'm writing that) to hear of the passing of Frederic Rzewski. I just posted this elsewhere:

A sad farewell to Frederic Rzewski (1938-2021). His fierce and uncompromising engagement is an example I've tried to follow; his artistry was unique and unrepeatable. I think it's ten years since the last time we saw each other and got worked up together about the state of the world. Too long. Some people have been around for such a long time that you don't worry about when you might see them next. Every one person in the end is defeated. As for the people united, let's hope and keep our voices alive.

[Bryn]

I just returned home from the airport (I can't quite believe I'm writing that) to hear of the passing of Frederic Rzewski. I just posted this elsewhere:

A sad farewell to Frederic Rzewski (1938-2021). His fierce and uncompromising engagement is an example I've tried to follow; his artistry was unique and unrepeatable. I think it's ten years since the last time we saw each other and got worked up together about the state of the world. Too long. Some people have been around for such a long time that you don't worry about when you might see them next. Every one person in the end is defeated. As for the people united, let's hope and keep our voices alive.

edit: if someone could correct my spelling of his name in the thread title that would be very kind.

Sad news indeed. Often seen as iracible, I was fortunate enough to have always encounted him in a far more friendly and communicative frame of mind, whether back in 1969 at rehearsals for the second (Highgate) performance of Paragraph 2 of what was then know as The Great Digest, by Conelius Cardew (a day after its premiere at the Round House), or when he and other members of MEV joined our music walk from the old Camden Fire Station Arts Club to the Embankment (a walk which caused much consternation among the police officers who wanted to know woh was in charge and what we were protesting against, neither of which held any relavence to us, or again, more recently, his encouragement to engage with Mendelssohn's Songs without Words. Fairwell, Fred.

[richardfinegold]

I worked in a record store in Ann Arbor as a College Studen in the Seventies and the manager was quite taken with, and would frequently play, The People United…etc. Icame to love the piece but never got around to purchasing it until well in the CD era. I’ve only heard a few works by him, but they were always interesting

[Bryn]

I worked in a record store in Ann Arbor as a College Studen in the Seventies and the manager was quite taken with, and would frequently play, The People United…etc. Icame to love the piece but never got around to purchasing it until well in the CD era. I’ve only heard a few works by him, but they were always interesting

I would strongly recommend Coming Together, especially if you can find it performed by Fred himself with Hoketus. In the HCMF performance broadcast by Radio 3, he stumbles about halfway through but quickly recovers. The stumble serves to add a certain frisson.

[jayne lee wilson]

Greatest Hits include........

https://www.qobuz.com/gb-en/album/bach-beethoven-rzewski-igor-levit/0886444998161

Gramophone Record of the Year 2016.....

[Mandryka]

A friend of mine heard him do Mendelssohn’s Songs without Words in California - he said it was wonderful, unforgettable, spiritual. I saw the programme note he wrote for the concert, where he talks about water imagery and the Kabbalah. Unfortunately I have never heard it.

Another friend of mine would talk about how he made a speciality of Stockhausen’s Klavierstuck X - that he would play it at parties, that sort of thing. Fortunately there is a record. And there are recordings too of his extraordinary reinterpretation of the Hammerklavier and Appassionata, and the Christian Wolff Preludes.

I have a strong memory of an interview on Radio 3 about 10 year ago, where he talked passionately about how live music making in small venues, improvising, was alive and kicking.

Listening now to Aki Takahashi play his fantasy on the Beatles Give Peace A Chance!

[ahinton]

A very sad loss indeed; an unique voice in latter 20th / 21st century music...

[Richard Barrett]

I would strongly recommend Coming Together, especially if you can find it performed by Fred himself with Hoketus.

In the Round House performance he managed between phrases to squeeze in a quick "stop talking at the front there!" without missing a beat. (You might remember Bryn that we rehearsed it at the LMC in the mid-80s with myself attempting the spoken part, but it didn't get as far as a performance.) One of my early encounters with him was in a festival in Belgium in the mid-90s when he'd been engaged to play (among other things) a very early piano piece of my own. He obviously hadn't spent much time working on it, but his partly improvised version was a bit improvement on what I'd written. The last time we worked together was at another festival, this time in 2010 in Cologne, where he took part in a performance of a score I'd written for improvising ensemble. This time he elected to play a tabletop full of toys and other random objects, leaving the piano to someone else (the excellent Austrian composer and pianist Elisabeth Harnik). Of course everything he did was somehow perfectly judged and timed. Other memories: the "Hammerklavier" in Amsterdam, mid-90s, "Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues" on several occasions, his beautiful Scratch Symphony, and many others. Irascible? I would say not suffering fools (or conservatives) gladly. He visited Belgrade and played here only three years ago but I was out of town at the time. I was sad at the time but much more so now I know that would have been our last encounter.

[Roslynmuse]

I would strongly recommend Coming Together, especially if you can find it performed by Fred himself with Hoketus. In the HCMF performance broadcast by Radio 3, he stumbles about halfway through but quickly recovers. The stumble serves to add a certain frisson.

That piece was my introduction to his music, 1984, when I was an undergraduate at Bangor. Listening to it now, the years just fall away. Amazing to think it is close to hitting its half-century.

[Bryn]

. . . Irascible? I would say not suffering fools (or conservatives) gladly. He visited Belgrade and played here only three years ago but I was out of town at the time. I was sad at the time but much more so now I know that would have been our last encounter.

I wrote of reputation as found among many who have worked with him, not my personal experience of him. As to his improvisational skills, I held Cardew in high esteme but when it comes his Variations on "We Sing for the Future", it was Rzewski's improvisions on those variations that first made the work listenable to, for me.

[Dave2002]

Sad to hear of this, though unlike others here I neither knew him, or heard him live.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederic_Rzewski

[Alison]

Sad to hear of this, though unlike others here I neither knew him, or heard him live.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederic_Rzewski

Endlessly fascinating and deep composer, Les Moutons de Panurge the first work I heard.

[Mandryka]

I would strongly recommend Coming Together, especially if you can find it performed by Fred himself with Hoketus. In the HCMF performance broadcast by Radio 3, he stumbles about halfway through but quickly recovers. The stumble serves to add a certain frisson.

https://wolf5th.blogspot.com/2018/03/169n-louis-andriessen-frederic-rzewski.html#more

[vinteuil]

.

... sad news indeed.

O - and Bryn -

Sad news indeed. Often seen as irascible, I was fortunate enough ....

... I don't think you're often seen as irascible




.

[Richard Barrett]

https://wolf5th.blogspot.com/2018/03...wski.html#more

That's a very nice recording of Coming Together, but note that the speaking part is taken by soprano Roberta Alexander rather than by FR himself and with a quite different (much more "dramatic") approach, no less powerful, indeed perhaps more so.