The subject of last night’s “composer portraits” at the Miller Theater (Columbia U.) was Frederic Rzewski (pronounced “jehv-ski”), a Massachusetts-born expatriate now in his late 60s, a pianist as well as a composer. Pointedly political for many years, Rzewski wrote his solo piano tour de force “The People United Will Never Be Defeated” in 1975, and last night the formidable Marilyn Nonken (Ph.D. in musicology) went at this 50-minute theme and variations with extraordinary command. The performance included a new cadenza by Ethan Iverson, the jazz pianist and co-leader of The Bad Plus—a trio I wrote about in February ’05 for The New Republic.
But the evening began with the New York premiere of the 2004 work “Bring Them Home,” for two pianos (Nonken and Ursula Oppens) and two percussionists (Tom Kolor and Dominic Donato). This piece, too, was performed to dazzling effect; it commenced with the piano lids shut, and both pianists tapping percussion on their bodies.
Rzewski is a man to push buttons, and he did so in a pre-concert talk with the writer and composer Kyle Gann. (He also did his damnedest to make the interviewer appear a fool, but Gann came through it OK.) Discussing the 17th-century Irish song “Siuil, A Run” (pronounced shool-a-roon), on which “Bring Them Home” is based, Rzewski touched briefly on the American Revolution and Shays’ Rebellion (1786-87). He spoke of the struggle between King George III and George Washington, but kept referring to the latter as “George W.”—petty, tendentious and unsurprising from an admirer of the overrated Howard Zinn, to whom Rzewski also made a de rigueur reference.
One can look dimly on President Bush and his Iraq debacle and still distrust bumper-sticker slogans like “Bring Them Home.” There was nothing simplistic, however, about Rzewski’s creation. Vibraphone, marimba, glockenspiel, field drum, snare drum, various whirligigs, dense but dynamically varied counterpoint from the pianos, finely honed communication between the four players: The piece was masterful.
“The People United” was a stark spectacle, with Nonken seated at the piano while Sergio Ortega’s “¡El Pueblo Unido Jamás Será Vencido!” played over the PA system. After roughly two minutes of this martial minor-key theme, Nonken launched into Rzewski’s 36 rigorously structured variations. Some stuck close to the melody; others sailed to the deepest ocean, with the shoreline of the theme receding into the distance. Nonken was virtuosic, committed, boundlessly expressive. In two places she literally cried out in a pained staccato (a device apparently called for in the score), piercing the air with a dagger of tension. Iverson’s cadenza was seamlessly integrated, a searching and insistent commentary.
The musical victory of “The People United” is total; its political import is more ambiguous. In the crowd chant of the Ortega song, one can hear either the cry of freedom or the sort of populist furor that leads to authoritarianism. The context of the song is resistance to Pinochet and the fight against Latin American fascism in general. Opposition to these evils should be celebrated. But the socialist alternatives have ranged from promising to horrific. There seems to be little introspection on this point among Rzewski and other protest-minded artists, such as Charlie Haden—who, as Iverson reminds us, included his own brief arrangement of “The People United” on the 1982 album Ballad of the Fallen (ECM).
It is bewildering to read Haden, in the liner notes to the Liberation Music Orchestra’s 1969 debut, call for “a world without war and killing” only to lionize Che Guevara on the very same album. Paul Berman has described Che as “an extreme dogmatist, instinctively authoritarian, allergic to any democratic or libertarian impulses, quick to order executions, and quicker still to lead his own comrades to their deaths in doomed guerrilla wars.” Read more here and here.
Like Haden, Rzewski can be not just provocative but exasperating. Musically, however, he has few rivals.
Comments are closed.