By Clarke Bustard
Richmond Times-Dispatch

Latest recording by eighth blackbird spotlights Rzewski

Richmond audiences have been introduced to a number of living composers by eighth blackbird in the group's year-old residency at the University of Richmond. Frederic Rzewski is one of the most fascinating creative personalities the sextet has brought to our attention.

Rzewski, a Westfield, Mass., native who lately has lived in Brussels, Belgium, is best-known for "political" pieces such as his 38 variations for piano on the Chilean song "The People United Will Never Be Defeated." (Any questions about his political leanings? Didn't think so.)

The 67-year-old composer and pianist has written in the prevailing -isms of art-music of his time, but he is better-known for incorporating American vernacular styles ragtime, blues, jazz -- into a distinctive personal idiom.

"He does not appear to be interested at all in the piano's historic ability to imitate other instruments . . . or the creamiest legato of an opera singer," The Boston Globe's Richard Dyer wrote of Rzewski recently. "Instead, he revels in the piano's identity as the most complex and varied of all percussion instruments."

Improvisation is another key characteristic of Rzewski's music. His written material usually has an improvisatory quality, and he often calls on performers to improvise in his scores.

The result is music of jangling rhythmic energy and a stream-of-consciousness sensibility.

"Fred," eighth blackbird's new disc of works by Rzewski (Cedille 084), includes "Pocket Symphony," which he wrote for the ensemble five years ago; "Les Moutons de Panurge" (1969), his musical fantasy on Rebelais' allegorical tale, which the group has performed in several Richmond concerts; and "Coming Together" (1971), a setting of a letter by Sam Melville, a left-wing activist imprisoned for participating in a series of 1969 bombings and killed under suspicious circumstances during the 1971 riot at the Attica prison in New York.

"Pocket Symphony" is the only work among the three that does not stem from a text, but it has the shape of a story line.

It builds on an urgently percolating riff -- not unlike the rhythmic underpinning of the "Rumble" from Leonard Bernstein's "West Side Story" -- into a series of improvised instrumental soliloquies, the most striking of which are for violin, percussion and piano.

"Les Moutons de Panurge," Rzewski's sonic realization of Rabelais' story of sheep plunging one after another into a stream, is a "musical game" in which 65 notes accumulate into a tune, then depart one at a time, disrupting the ensemble "herd" as they stray. The trick for performers is to make the disruption rhythmically interesting without descending into chaos.

"Coming Together," arranged for the sextet by its violinist, Matt Albert, is another accumulative piece -- in this case, a buildup of volume and emotion as Melville's spoken words and their accompaniment rise from hopeful prose to a cry of rage and desperation.

All three pieces play to eighth blackbird's strengths: advanced instrumental technique, rhythmic precision, theatricality, skill at exchanging sounds conversationally, and fluency in an idiom that draws from many musical sources but speaks with a singular voice.

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