Frederic Rzewski - Les Moutons de Panurge (1969) [Audio + Score]

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Frederic Rzewski - Les Moutons de Panurge (1969) [Audio + Score]
BIOGRAPHY
Sometimes recognized as a virtuoso pianist, sometimes as a composer in his own right, Frederic Rzewski is one of the most consistent, creative personalities of the last few decades. He is capable of exhilarating energy, performing his long piano compositions as to develop insightful ideas about the role of artists in a broader socio-historical context.
The Sixties took Rzewski to Europe performing Stockhausen, Boulez, Cage, Bussotti, Kagel and many other composers as well as co-founding the influential electronic ensemble MEV with Alvin Curran and Richard Teitelbaum.
Around 1969, he composed "Les Moutons de Panurge," a radical experiment with additive melodic formulas labeled after as minimalism. A few years after this piece, Rzewski balanced minimal accented cells with political texts in the remarkable "Attica" and "Coming Together" (both 1972).
During the seventies, he was deeply concerned about problems relating to crises in musical theory, sociopolitical questions and aesthetic language.
Regarding all of this, Rzewski's music has coped with many tensions and, in his own words, "it seemed to me (that) there was no reason why the most difficult and complex formal structures could not be expressed in a form which could not be understood by a wide variety of listeners", something for which he was criticized for.
But heterogeneity has been the landmark of Rzewski's work, a point clearly stated by new music authority Kyle Gann about an early American period - eclectic, bristling with Ivesian quotation and collage, tinged with folk song and minimalism - and his recent European works: enigmatic, dense in their motivic logic, often even 12-tone.
In the seventies, his work included the remarkable North American Ballads (1979) and his epic variations on El Pueblo Unido Jamás Será Vencido! (1975), this last as an enormous example of political music in the most broader sense, putting Rzewski at the same tradition beside composers like Cornelius Cardew, Hans Werner Henze, Hanns Eisler, Kurt Weill and Luigi Nono.
In this second group of works could fit other projects that he did during the '80's such as Antigone Legend (1982), based on Bertolt Brecht, The Triumph of Death (1987), about a play by Peter Weiss on the Auschwitz trial of 1964, and The Waves (1988) based on Shakespeare's sonnet sixty, all of which use different instrumental resources.
In the last years, Frederic Rzewski has been focused on long works using piano and text resources like De Profundis (1992) "for a speaking pianist" in which performer recites selected passages from Oscar Wilde's letter to Lord Alfred Douglas during author's imprisonment in Reading.
One of his most recent works is a mammoth three-and-a-half-hour "novel for piano" called The Road, including 64 movements "darted angularly, driven by small, reiterated motives"; they often lapsed into clusters and accompanying vocal sounds, but always with thoughtful calm rather than violence. Occasional programmatic moments (at one point, Rzewski blew a toy train whistle and rattled bells in a choo-choo rhythm) didn't do much to render the music's interval-based atonality less abstract.
The work was supposed to evoke the experience of driving down a winding road; in reality, the movements (called "miles") suggested self-contained units, each with its own aphoristic logic". Frederic Rzewski gave a memorable concert in his only visit to Buenos Aires, Argentina during Festival Internacional Experimenta from October 2nd to 11th, 2000.
This conversation took part the day after the concert in which he has performed some of his "piano novels" as soon as a delicate piece by Belgian Henri Pousseur ("Memoires d'Icare," 1994 in memoriam Karel Goeyvaerts) and an outstanding version of Cornelius Cardew's "We Sing for the Future" (1981) just previous to its release on the New Albion label.
A lot of intelligent, sensitive and powerful music was heard at the recital. Taking into account this fact, I preferred to talk not only about music but also about some ideas and concerns behind Rzewski's creative personality.

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So glad I found this video again!! YES

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Genius!

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Thank you for doing this!

[@topologyrob]

Isn't it twice as fast as the score indicates?

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can not do !!!!!