Frederic Rzewski

This disc gathers three piano works by Frederic Rzewski from 1989 to 2005, played by Robert Satterlee, the pianist for whom one of them was written. Fantasia was composed in 1989 and rewritten in 1999, when, in the composer's words quoted by Naxos, he changed the music "to obscure the tune, putting in lots of wrong notes". Second Hand, or Alone at Last (2005) is a set of six novelettes for the left hand alone. De Profundis (1992), which Rzewski described as an oratorio for speaking pianist, sets the long letter that Oscar Wilde wrote during his imprisonment in Reading Gaol. Two of the three works make unusual demands on the player, one by withholding a hand, the other by adding voice and body to the keyboard.

Satterlee recorded the disc on 27 and 28 May 2007 in the Mabel Shaw Bridges Hall of Music at Pomona College, Claremont, California, with Genevieve Lee producing and Fred Vogler engineering; the booklet notes are by Satterlee and Rzewski. According to Steve Arloff in MusicWeb International (2014), the first version of Fantasia was a commission from the Japanese pianist Aki Takahashi, and the revision keeps a lyrical core under its deliberate smudging. Rzewski wrote Second Hand after a period in which he could not use his right hand, discovering how much the left could do when it occupies the whole keyboard. De Profundis asks the pianist to recite Wilde's text in notated rhythm while singing, humming, whistling, sounding a Harpo horn and striking the piano and his own body. In its most painful passage, on Wilde's failed relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas, the lid is closed and the performer whispers while beating the case of the instrument. For Arloff the music beneath the words moves from a Bach-like fugue to shades of nineteenth-century Romantic piano writing and frantic clusters. Arloff called the piece "a tour de force that has an extremely serious intent".

Naxos CD 8.559760 in the American Classics series, released in 2014, seven years after the sessions.