SFIPF Revisits a Rzewski Premiere

Last night the San Francisco International Piano Festival (SFIPF) revisited a United States premiere performance presented by Bobby Mitchell at last year’s Festival. The composition was Frederic Rzewski’s seven-movement “Songs of Insurrection.” The performance took place at The Freight and Salvage in Berkeley. An audio recording captured the performance, which has been uploaded to a YouTube file, whose only video is a static image of one of Rzewski’s score pages. The PDF program book for the Festival also included a hyperlink to the score that the composer uploaded to IMSLP. That hyperlink was incorrect; but there still is a “Songs of Insurrection” Web page from which the score can be downloaded.

Rzewski is probably best known for “The People United Will Never Be Defeated!,” a set of 36 variations on the Chilean song "¡El pueblo unido jamás será vencido!" by Sergio Ortega and Quilapayún, which has probably assumed the status of the variations composition of the twentieth century. The nineteenth century provided two such prodigious undertakings, one by Ludwig van Beethoven, his Opus 120, on a simple waltz by Anton Diabelli and one by Johannes Brahms, his Opus 35, on the theme for the theme-and-variations caprice that concludes Niccolò Paganini’s Opus 1 set of 24 caprices for solo violin. Rzewski decidedly raised the bar set by his two predecessors.

“Songs of Insurrection” is very much another matter. The score itself never identifies any specific songs associated with revolutionary movements. Indeed, there are so many opportunities for improvisation (which the composer insists should be spontaneous, that the pianist is free to add his/her own favorite folk songs to the mix (or, for that matter, any of the pop and rock songs that emerged during protests against the Vietnam War). It might even be fair to say that each of the seven movements is an extended fantasia imposing a wide variety of technical demands on the pianist over and above what is expected through improvisation.

Just listening to Mitchell makes for engaging listening. Nevertheless, watching would probably have been even more informative. There are a variety of percussive passages that clearly involve much more of the piano than the keyboard. I also detected several movements that involved reaching over the keyboard and stroking the strings by hand. This is one of those compositions in which what the pianist is doing is as significant as what the ear perceives.

Nevertheless, because this music is so challenging, there are few opportunities to encounter it. An audio-only experience may not be optimal. However, if that is all that is available, it should be approached as at least an introduction to one of the most challenging compositions of the current century (a status that is likely to endure for many decades into the future).