Thomas Kotcheff: Songs of Insurrection by Frederic Rzewski
Coviello Contemporary

Hear the name Frederic Rzewski (b. 1938) and chances are reference to The People United Will Never Be Defeated! will quickly follow. He's hardly the only composer whose name's become synonymous with a particular creation—William Basinski (The Disintegration Loops) and Alvin Lucier (I Am Sitting in a Room) also spring to mind. Yet like them, Rzewski's output extends far beyond a single work, with this recent recording by Los Angeles-based pianist Thomas Kotcheff (b. 1988) presenting other compelling material by the composer. Based on international protest songs from different eras and places, Songs of Insurrection is a concert-length, seven-part work for solo piano that is both the premiere recording of the piece and Kotcheff's debut solo album.

No one would seem to be better qualified for the project. Like Rzewski, Kotcheff's a composer as well as pianist; furthermore, he's spent more than a decade immersed in Rzewski's music, with many of his works part of Kotcheff's performance repertoire, and completed his doctoral requirements at The University of Southern California with a lecture on The People United Will Never Be Defeated!. He's regularly commissioned and premiered new piano pieces and is one-half of the LA-based piano duo HOCKET.

Though the pianist has described Songs of Insurrection as “fiendishly difficult to play” and spent more than a year learning it, he never wavered in his desire to perform and record it. With its focus on multiple voices uniting in their call for democracy and freedom, the message of the work resonated with Kotcheff immediately. It's no coincidence that Rzewski wrote the piece in 2016 at a critical moment in US and global politics.

Though the songs weren't written by him in their originating form, he's used them as starting points for his own reimaginings; the pianist completes the process in being invited to include improvisation in each movement with, which Kotcheff does in five cases. Typically, the original song is introduced before Rzewski's treatments set in, with jazz, classical, blues, folk, and other styles emerging in the renderings. Given the material's broad scope, it's not uncommon for delicate, lyrical passages to appear alongside dense, aggressive sections; that's especially the case when the pieces range from seven to nearly seventeen minutes and thus lend themselves to intense exploration. Included in a booklet accompanying the release are essays by Zak Cheney-Rice, Ted Hearne, and Kristi Brown-Montesano that expound on the work's themes and amplify its contemporary relevance, its connection to ‘Black Lives Matter' one example.

Written in 1933 by leftist prisoners of the Third Reich, “Die Moorsoldaten” acts as a good illustration of Rzewski's theme-and-variations approach when the song's melody is voiced simply at the outset before blossoming into an elaborate series of explorations. Shifting from Germany to Russia, “Katyusha” presents a Soviet-era song written in 1938 by Matvey Blanter in support of soldiers fighting the Nazis. The Negro spiritual “Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around,” which became a freedom song of the American Civil Rights movement in the ‘60s, both adds a pronounced blues-gospel feel to the recording and dazzles with a mesmerizing display of virtuosity during a central episode. After knocking sounds introduce Zeca Afonso's 1971 “Grândola, Vila Morena,” which concerns the revolution that led to democratic rule in Portugal, Kotcheff examines its material probingly from multiple angles.

The album concludes with its longest settings, “Los Cuatro Generales,” a Spanish song of resistance against Franco's dictatorial regime, and “Oh Bird, Oh Bird, Oh Roller,” a product of the peasant revolt in 1890s Korea against exploitative taxation. In stretching out for seventeen minutes, the latter piece affords the pianist the greatest latitude in terms of contrasts in tempo and dynamics; a slow, hushed passage two-thirds of the way into the performance impresses as particularly affecting. In Kotcheff, Rzewski has found a most sympathetic interpreter whose sensibility is clearly attuned to his own. The conviction the pianist brings to this magnificent recording of the composer's work attests to the powerful bond the two clearly share.

December 2020