Rzewski Plays Rzewski: Piano Works, 1975-1999

Copy at Case Memorial Library
Matthew Gurewitsch wrote in the New York Times: "In photographs the American composer Frederic Rzewski resembles an Old Testament prophet, all high-domed brow, deep-gazing eyes and white, wind-swept hair. … He turned 70 on April 13, 'and for some reason, it made me go back to Ibycus,' he said. He quoted the poet’s haunted lines about falling in love in old age: 'Like the old racehorse, I tremble at the prospect of the course which I am to run, and which I know so well.' Mr. Rzewski reads the ancient Greeks in the original. … Once asked if commentators were right to call him a Marxist composer, he snorted, 'Harpo or Groucho or what?' The anarchic streak in his music is as much comic as it is political. Somewhere in his seven-CD box 'Rzewski Plays Rzewski: Piano Works, 1975-1999' on the Nonesuch label, between fantasias on protest songs and chapters of his mammoth pianistic 'novel' in progress, 'The Road,' there is a cameo turn for a seriously vocal rubber ducky. Yet what emerges above all is a picture of a pianist enamored of his instrument as handed down by the master builders of the 19th century."