Frederic Rzewski

This disc gathers four late piano works by Frederic Rzewski, who died in 2021, in first recordings by Bobby Mitchell, the pianist to whom he dedicated several of his last scores. War Songs (2008) weaves together six war and anti-war songs from the last seven centuries. Ruins and Wake Up (2014) are the last two pieces of the large piano cycle Dreams, both dedicated to Igor Levit. Winter Nights (2015), written for Mitchell, is a triptych that Rzewski meant as a help against insomnia, after the story told of Bach's Goldberg Variations, and Saints and Sinners (2016) closes the programme. Naxos describes the themes of these pieces as typical of his whole output in their uncompromising and universal nature.

Mitchell recorded the disc on 12 and 13 February 2022 at The Right Place Studio in Brussels, with Marc-Henri Cykiert producing and editing and Bastien Gilson engineering, and wrote the booklet notes himself. War Songs, at fifteen minutes, layers its quotations in dense dissonance, which Christian Carey in Sequenza21 compared to Ives. Ruins is intensely contrapuntal, with thunderous bass and angular lines, and Wake Up opens with the Woody Guthrie song of that title. Winter Nights moves between post-tonal passagework full of trills and very slow, thin single lines; Claire Jackson, in BBC Music Magazine in 2023, found the trills of the second night too interesting to sleep through and the rumbling of the third closer to a nightmare. Saints and Sinners, a single movement of almost fourteen minutes, recalls for Carey the mid-century American neoclassicists. Jackson praised Mitchell for premiering on disc a group of Rzewski pieces that remain largely unknown, while Carey wrote of a superb, vivid rendering of detailed scores. He called the release "excellent in terms of curation, quality of music, and performance".

Naxos CD 8.559928 in the American Classics series, released in March 2023.